Peter Mellalieu (third from left) and Patrick Dodd (fourth from left), with NZIE staff at the ceremony
A project investigating the use of digital tools to improve group outcomes in business teams has won an award for Best Research Paper at a recent New Zealand Institute of Education (NZIE) symposium.
Business Lecturers Dr Maryam Mirzaei and Patrick Dodd attended the NZIE Business Management and Leadership Symposium in November with the aim of presenting their paper and receiving feedback from industry representatives and academics, and were pleased to come away with the win.
The project was initiated a few years ago by a former Unitec professor Dr Peter Mellaieu and Patrick Dodd. They focused on using digital tools that incorporate peer assessment and peer feedback to improve group project outcomes, and improve career readiness. This research was initially limited to the tertiary sector.
Maryam said that when she joined the team last year she began investigating the applicability of the model to actual businesses, in particular for better managing new forms of teams with a less hierarchical structure such as fluid teams, agile teams and self-directed teams .
“Recently, with the addition to the team of internal and external experts including Applied Business Lecturer Craig Robertson, we’ve been looking at either modifying the existing application or developing a new application that could be used to improve team performance in work-based teams” said Maryam.
The NZIE Symposium was an opportunity to collaborate and discuss current practice with a mix of academics and industry representative.
“An important highlight of this project is its reciprocal nature. While we often work with industry to transfer knowledge and best practices from industry to our students, in this project we are offering the industry a tried and tested method to deal with shared problems related to self-organising teams in a knowledge creation environment. In a way, we are transferring best practices from education to business” said Maryam.