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Photographs by Michael J. Clarke
spring 2024
Sawyer Business School students have used immersive learning principles on projects ranging from consulting for restaurateur Eric Papachristos, BSBA ’93, MBA ’99, to considering how to address the systemic issues plaguing Boston’s MBTA.
Playing merengue music in a Greek restaurant isn’t just off-brand, it’s also a missed opportunity.
That was one of many conclusions a group of first-year Sawyer Business School (SBS) students presented to the founders of Greek restaurant Saloniki, including Suffolk alumnus and CEO Eric Papachristos, BSBA ’98, MBA ’99. As part of their Business Foundations course, the students were helping the Boston-based, fast-casual chain better understand how it can increase its appeal to the elusive tastes of Generation Z.
Working with and presenting to real clients has been a staple of a Sawyer Business School education for many years. Indeed, it’s one of the school’s differentiating factors for employers who crave graduates with real-world experience who can hit the ground running when they enter the workplace.
But over the past few years, experiential education at SBS has evolved into something more robust and encompassing called immersive learning. It goes beyond finding great partners with whom students can work—including local companies like the Boston Red Sox and George Howell Coffee or international nonprofits like CARE and businesses like Marsh McLennan. Immersive learning aims to provide a systematic and cohesive structure for the entire real-world, real-client experience so that students gain not just practical skills, but whole new ways of thinking about how business works.
“This is not brand new or a completely drastic change from what we have been doing,” says Sawyer Business School Dean Amy Zeng. “It is grounded in years of practice. But immersive learning takes it at least one step further to make it more structured and more measurable.”
This new framework, dubbed the IMMERSE Blueprint (see sidebar), is the result of extensive research and analysis undertaken during the 2022–23 academic year across the Business School. It synthesizes the criteria for immersive pedagogy in a common structure that can be implemented in a wide range of learning modalities, including courses, consulting projects, and internships. The goal, says Kevin Sweeney—the Business School’s director of strategic partnerships for experiential learning and a key author of the IMMERSE Blueprint—is to create “safe and engaging learning environments where students can experiment and practice without fear, receive constructive feedback, and benefit from thoughtful reflection,” all while defining their career paths and sharpening the professional skills most relevant for their fields.
IMMERSE is already being introduced at all levels of the Business School, from first-year offerings like Business Foundations to graduate courses. During the fall semester, students applied its principles to consulting and project work they did for a dozen clients, including SCU Credit Union; ARTES, a Cypriot startup that uses a science-based service to authenticate art and collections; and Ardelyx, a biotech drug company.
An essential component of IMMERSE is to ask students to continuously reflect on what they’ve learned so that all that new knowledge becomes embedded in their skill set. The goal is to give them a complete continuum of learning they can return to and reference as they grow their careers.
By Ben Hall
As everyone in the Boston area knows (and likely has experienced), the local transit authority—known as the MBTA or simply “the T”—is having a bit of a moment.
Slow zones. Full-line shutdowns that fix nothing. Trains catching on fire. As one local wag put it, “You can’t spell ‘disaster’ without the T.” It will require billions of dollars and superhuman political will to fix it.
Which is exactly why it became the semester-long assignment in the Business School’s new Tackling Wicked Global Problems course. Using IMMERSE as a road map, the course asked students to explore a complicated issue—dysfunctional public transit—from multiple angles. It wasn’t simply about finding a single solution, like how to make the Green Line run faster or crack down on fare beaters. It was about understanding the role companies play in broader society and the many, many different parts and constituencies involved when you try to untangle a large and seemingly intractable problem.
“It's figuring out the role of organizations as one stakeholder among many in addressing social problems, whether it’s transportation or climate change or inequality, gender rights, and things of that nature,” said Professor Russell Seidle, director of SBS first-year programs and one of the teachers of Tackling Wicked Global Problems. “It’s getting students to think beyond the narrow scope of business and to consider business as an actor in society. From there the question becomes, ‘How can companies also contribute to that same society?’”
In other words, the goal of the Business School is evolving: It’s not just here to teach students how to be good corporate citizens—it also wants them to be good global citizens. The course even caught the eye of The Boston Globe, which made it the lead story in its weekly transit newsletter.
Back at Saloniki, students utilized strategic planning tools like Ansoff’s matrix and PESTEL analysis, which evaluates growth initiatives and identifies potential threats and weaknesses. To help answer the main question of how Saloniki can balance technology with a personal touch, the winning team proposed a menu powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that helps make the ordering experience more robust. After customers list their preferences, AI not only would suggest dishes but also provide recommendations for personalized plating and garnishing. It would even weave in Greek mythology based on what a customer ordered.
A Wicked Pain
Like any start-up, Dean Zeng notes, immersive learning will be a multi-stage process. “To some degree we are in the exploratory stage,” she says, “just trying to figure out how we can really make this work and be effective for our students. Eventually, student outcomes will be a testament to its success, and then feedback from employers to see how this approach has had an impact.”
Seidle, for one, is optimistic. He believes that Tackling Wicked Global Problems is the first undergraduate course in the country, and maybe the world, to take this kind of holistic approach to business education—and could serve as a model for others. A workshop on the course that he conducted last June with Associate Dean Pelin Bicen at the Gardner Institute’s Symposium on Transforming the Foundational Postsecondary Experience was greeted enthusiastically by other educators. Institute founder John Gardner made a point of singling out Sawyer’s new curriculum, praising the Business School’s focus on the first-year student experience and on competence-based pedagogy.
Associate Dean Jodi Detjen en-countered a similar reception last fall when she led a workshop on immersive learning at Rutgers University’s Innovations in Undergraduate and Graduate Business Education Conference. Afterward, people stopped Detjen repeatedly with questions, asking for details on the new curriculum and how Suffolk has been able to overcome faculty, administrative, and student hurdles it has encountered.
“What we’ve learned is that implementation is where most universities fall down in their attempt to do immersive learning. Because we’ve been doing it for over a decade,” Detjen says, “we’re ahead of the game.”
The Start of Something Great
The IMMERSE Blueprint
What’s in a name? When it comes to IMMERSE, it’s an entire framework for the Sawyer Business School’s new focus on immersive learning, which builds and expands on the principles of experiential learning. Each letter in the IMMERSE acronym stands for a different element of the pedagogy, which the Business School is now introducing across a wide range of courses, consulting projects, and internships.
INTEGRATIVE: Unify as many critical interdisciplinary principles and themes throughout the students’ degree curriculum as possible.
MULTI-SENSORY: Involve different sensory modalities to maximize learning and engagement.
MOTIVATIONAL: Build experiences that engage and inspire students to learn and solve complex problems.
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EMOTIONAL: Connect with students emotionally in addition to intellectually through personal reflection on what matters to them and why.
RELEVANT: Extend learning beyond the theoretical to practical application of what students have learned to problems experienced by key stakeholders.
SYNERGISTIC: Create interactive environments for team-based collaboration and ongoing engagement with important constituencies.
EXPERIENTIAL: Implement the principles of experiential (hands-on, real-world) learning in multiple teaching contexts.