USIU/IFC/GBSN Case Development Project Progress

This project has two main parts: 

1. Developing 8 high-quality case studies per years for 3 years. We are supposed to complete the development of the first set by June 2005 and we are on schedule. Eight faculty members are now directly involved, namely, Charles Mayaka, Gerald Chege, George Kaol, Peter Lewa, Catherine Munene, Teresia Linge, Anzaya Mbithe, Peter Kiriri and Francis Gatumo. This is the case development team. I serve as the Project Director (I will not have to write a case!). The team has discovered that writing international and high quality teaching cases is a very demanding intellectual effort and requires a different mindset from writing research papers.
2. Faculty development (also called capacity building) through workshops. The 3-day Naivasha case-teaching workshop for 30 full-time faculty and some adjunct faculty was a success and created interest and enthusiasm. Five of the case writers will be in Johannesburg to attend a workshop on the Teaching the Practice of Management. This is similar to the Colloquium on Participant-Centered Learnng that Dr. Kaol and I attended at Harvard Business School in August 2004. An additional 16 full-time faculty members will be attending the local case-teaching and/or case writing workshops that will be held in the 3^rd and 4^th of May 2005. The idea is to equip all of us for case-teaching and writing in the next AY.

 Other supplementary activities include the CEO Roundtable that was held in January and facilitated by our mentors. We hope to make this a half-yearly event and the next one will be in August or October 2005. The School has also been covered in local and international media because of the case project and our participation in the Global Business School Network. We have even had MBA students at Columbia Business School write a case on USIU business school under the supervision of one of our mentors, Professor Murray Low. The outcomes of this project have so far been way beyond our initial expectations.

 As a school, we have also redesigned the faculty evaluation template to give weight to case teaching and case writing. We shall endeavor to maintain the momentum.