Sunway College Diploma in Business Administration Programme (DBA) - Integrated Group Assignments

Sunway College Diploma Studies, Diploma in Business Administration (DBA) programme AT SCKL has created and implemented integrated group assignments (IGA) for our students for the past two years.

The objective of the IGA is for students to combine 5 subjects in a semester into a single business plan. The business plan could be to seek financing for a start-up or to make recommendations for improvement.

For our Jan 2021 semester 5 students, our DBA programme collaborated with our Sunway group’s subsidiary, Sunway FutureX Farm (SFXF). Students were tasked to investigate and analyse the business model of SFXF. They were commissioned to make recommendations to target the youth market whose level of awareness were low in the benefits and opportunities of urban farming and healthy lifestyle dieting. The penetration and response rate on the youth market’s most widely used social media platform, Instagram was also low.

A site visit to SFXF was organized which culminated in about 60 students split into their assignment groupings that had a staggered tour of the SFXF facilities culminating with knowledge sharing and Q&A sessions by the SFXF Team.

Despite the strict SOPs that were followed, students found the trip invigorating after a year of not being on campus due the various lockdowns. It also helped them tremendously in getting first-hand knowledge of information needed to complete their assignments.

Pedagogically, the site visit served as an invaluable and tangible experience as part of their formative assessment. The IGA was meant to reduce student assignment workload to focus on greater depth. However, the biggest benefit was that students had a better understanding of how different subjects are linked to each other and that it should not be learnt in isolation.

The IGA is an ongoing endeavour to better equip our graduates for further studies or to hit the ground running in the employment market with integrative communication and team work skills.

We would like to thank the team at SFXF, Ms. Eleanor Choong and Ms. Koo and the rest of the team as well as Mr. Gobindran, Head of DBA programme at Sunway Diploma studies who mooted the idea of Integrated Group Assignments for a successful visit.