Exploring pedagogies, opportunities and challenges of teaching and learning programming in business school

1. Introduction

Computer programming can help business students automate routine tasks to increase productivity and operational efficiency (Nambisan, 2017). Understanding programming helps business students better collaborate with technical teams to ensure business models can be achieved by technical solutions (Alavi et al., 1995). Meanwhile, business students can use computer programming to conduct big-data analytics and inform strategic business decisions (Marr, 2021). Therefore, equipping business students with programming skills is essential and critical for enhancing students’ employability and market value.

However, learning programming is always a challenging task. Previous studies found that factors leading to poor learning of programming include inappropriate pedagogy, insufficient instructional materials, cognitive problems and a lack of critical and computational thinking skills (Chukwunweike Nwangwu, 2015; Medeiros et al., 2018; Elçiçek and Karal, 2020). Several studies have been devoted to proposing pedagogies, suggesting that interactive lectures, computer-based activities, team collaboration, game-based learning and problem-based learning can help computer science students perform better in programming-related courses (Buitrago Flórez et al., 2017; Arcos et al., 2018). However, there exist distinctive differences in learning objectives and curriculum content between computer science and business students. For business students, the emphasis is on how to apply programming skills to conduct data manipulation and enhance business processes, rather than understanding complex theories of algorithms (Sollosy and McInerney, 2022). Therefore, there is a lack of appropriate pedagogy for teaching programming in business schools. This study aims to answer the following three research questions:

RQ1. How to design an appropriate pedagogy for teaching programming to business students? Is it possible to integrate both computer science and business pedagogy?

RQ2. How do students rate this pedagogy? What are the associated opportunities and challenges?

RQ3. What should we do to further improve this novel pedagogy?

This study is built around the development and evaluation of an interdisciplinary pedagogy, which integrates both business and computer science pedagogy and is based on a series of theories. This study further uses an empirical approach to test this pedagogy through delivering a programming course to final-year business graduates. This study observes students’ behaviour during the course to gain insights into how they engage with and respond to this interdisciplinary approach. This study also conducts a thematic analysis of students’ reflective diaries to identify...