TBS is delighted to have been selected for the finals of the 2021 AMBA & BGA Excellence Awards for Best Innovation Strategy thanks to its project on humour in management education.

Best Innovation Strategy

Every year, the AMBA & BGA Excellence Awards celebrate excellence and commend achievement among business schools, students, graduates, suppliers, and employers that share AMBA & BGA’s values of ambition, impact and integrity. The Best Innovation Strategy award celebrates innovation and radical thinking in business education across all business school areas. This category recognizes and rewards game-changing new practices, risks and creativity around AMBA-accredited and BGA member programmes.

TBS Education has been selected for the finals, thanks to its project on ‘Teaching through comedy: injecting humour into educational videos’. The other finalists are the business schools of Harbin Institute of Technology (China), Imperial College London (UK), Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and the University of Glasgow (UK). Winners will be unveiled at a special virtual awards ceremony during the AMBA & BGA Festival of Excellence on 29th January 2021.

Innovative Teaching at TBS

Founded in 1903, TBS has a long history in pedagogical innovation. The school continuously experiments with new teaching and learning methods to draw the attention of students and stimulate their online and on-campus learning experience. At TBS, you will find hackatons, escape games, design thinking, MOOCs, business games, virtual reality… The school also partners with EdTech France, the Learning Lab Network and the Babson Collaborative to constantly launch new initiatives.

The Inspiring Guest Project

Last year, TBS launched its Inspiring Guest project to inject even more creativity and fun in teaching and management education. The initiative has the school collaborate with an inspiring personality from outside business academia to stimulate both the learning process and student motivation.

The Inspiring Guest project featured American comedian Sammy Obeid (known as host of “100 Humans” on Netflix) in humorous educational videos to make learning as effective and as engaging as possible. The resulting videos cover such topics as finance, international business, marketing, organizational behavior and statistics.

Humor in Management Education

The project is based on the premise that a thoughtful injection of professional-grade humor into educational videos can help increase student attention, make the topic easier to understand, facilitate memorization of new concepts and reduce anxiety about learning. For each video, a detailed teaching note is available to educators at no cost. Don’t hesitate to visit the TBS Open Teaching and Learning Resources for more information.

A highly lauded approach

On August 9th, 2020, TBS Professor David Stolin and TBS Inspiring Guest Sammy Obeid conducted a live online workshop about this project at the Teaching and Learning Conference (TLC), held as part of the 2020 Academy of Management annual meeting. The session was voted Best TLC Session out of nearly 50 sessions held this year and resulted in a video about expectancy theory of motivation.

About AMBA

Spearheading excellence and trailblazing innovation, for more than 50 years the Association of MBAs (AMBA) has been the impartial authority on post-graduate management education. AMBA established that vision in 1967 and, in a volatile, uncertain world, it’s as relevant today as it was then. The association is committed to raising the profile and quality standards of business education internationally, for the benefit of Business Schools, students and alumni, employers, communities and society. For more information on the AMBA Excellence Awards and Accreditation Services, please visit the AMBA website.

About BGA

The Business Graduates Association (BGA) is an international membership and accreditation body of world-leading and high-potential Business Schools that share a commitment for responsible management practices and lifelong learning, and that are looking to provide a positive impact on their students, communities and the economy as a whole. For more information, please visit the BGA website.

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