Digital Action Programme for Business Administration

Digital internships provide students with real world business consultancy engagements



The Digital Action Programme for Business Administration provides a capstone course in which students deepen and apply their learning through a 'Digital Action Programme'; (DAP). In the DAP, students are grouped into cohorts (typically five students) and must work both individually and together on a specific, real, contemporary business consultancy problem, normally proposed by a cooperating organisation (corporation or non-profit), which results in a comprehensive solution proposal.



This provides students with a real world business consultancy engagement, and the opportunity to produce, both individually and as a team, a substantial piece of relevant, scholarly, and actionable research, to be presented directly to stakeholders in the cooperating organisation.



Over the course of the DAP, students fulfil the learning objectives: each student demonstrates their comprehensive knowledge and understanding of key business processes; each student uses multidisciplinary approaches to perform critical analyses of real business issues in situations of uncertainty and incomplete information in order to develop an actionable solution; each student practises teamwork, exercises their leadership skills, and reflects on their own performance and the performance of their cohort; and each student communicates to members of their cohort, the cooperating organisation, and faculty members from Woolf.



Students are required to demonstrate autonomy, individual scholarly acumen, self-reflection in their engagement with peers, role adaptability within their cohort, and teamwork while engaged in the DAP.



The goal of the DAP is (1) to fulfil the learning objectives and (2) to produce a project portfolio containing an analysis of the business problem and the proposed solution.



DAP Roles and Responsibilities



(a) Individual students

Students are required to take responsibility for their own work, they must act autonomously on the basis of their prior learning and experience, and they must individually generate key research results that contribute to the DAP.



Each student must individually contribute through assignment submissions, which are marked on their individual merits. The final mark on the course (as described below) consists of 50% for the individual research submissions, and 50% for the cohorts final project taken as a whole. The final project contains individual contributions, but requires teamwork, and is graded as whole in terms of its fulfillment of the learning objectives.



Thus 15 ECTS worth of the course is based on individual work, and 15 ECTS is based on the collaborative work of the Cohort.



(b) Cohorts

Cohorts are groups of about 5 students that are assigned to address a single business problem, on which they commit to working both individually and as a team. All cohorts must agree to a cohort charter, which outlines the roles and responsibilities of the team. The cohort charter must include the following topics: timeliness; comprehensive designation of areas of responsibility, including gathering meeting agenda items, chairing meetings, meeting note-taking, and being the point of contact for the cooperating organisation; a schedule of rotating leadership positions across the modules units, and a commitment to professional teamwork that prioritises the goal of the DAP.



(c) Tutors

All cohorts are assigned a Woolf tutor to facilitate three cohort tutorials for each unit, and all cohorts are assigned a designated contact person from a cooperating organisation.



The role of the tutor in cohort tutorials is to ensure that students are achieving the learning objectives, and that the cohort is on course with their programme roadmap. As the DAP progresses, students are expected to increase their management over the tutorial meetings, including setting the meeting agenda.



(d) Cooperating organisations

Cooperating organisations must register and be verified with Woolf, provide an initial portfolio of basic information on the company, provide a designated contact person, and agree to the standard 'cooperating organisation framework' – which commits them to attending a minimum number of meetings with a cohort, and they are encouraged to provide students with access to the executive members of their organisation.



In cases where relations with a cooperating organisation become untenable for any reason, and the cohort is unable to continue with the relationship, then cohorts will be provided with the choice of

(a) continuing their DAP without further input from the cooperating organisation,

(b) switching to a new cooperating organisation, or

(c) selecting a contemporary business problem on the basis of publicly available information and in agreement with their tutor



DAP Timeline of Assignments

Each unit of the module normally requires about 75 hours of work from each member of the cohort. Individuals must complete their projects on schedule – neither early nor late – and in response to the requirements of their project; cohorts have the opportunity to adjust the amount of time dedicated to each unit.



The cohort meetings are an opportunity for the instructor to check in on the team progress; they are a key checkpoint for individual submissions, and they provide milestones in the progress of the DAP. Before every cohort meeting, each student is required to submit a status report on individual and team performance.



At the end of the DAP, every cohort submits a Final Report, Final Presentation, and the Final Reflection on their experience.