Page 10 - General Cases 1

For the authors the short case study was an emerging force

in their case method arsenal. One moreover, that that they
saw as offering a vehicle that equally addressed case

truisms and the objectives of both the lecturer and learner,

if handled correctly.

How the authors addressed the construction, development,

and use of short cases, based on their experiences and

technology application, is examined here. It would be true to
say that their business courses had changed in the last

twenty years! For one thing, class contact had reduced to

the point where a module of one or more years may now

only have an effective contact period of nine or less weeks.

The impact of this was that material coverage was limited

with the knock-on-effect was that traditional cases of fifteen

to thirty pages were inappropriate in that they inevitably

cover theory not taught in class.

Personal experience, formulated around the need to deliver

more focussed cases for use in predominantly tutorial

situations (See Diagram 1), manifested in the writing of a
series of cases of varying lengths, for the sake of argument,

ranked as case vignette, caselette and traditional case study
(See Diagram 2) and delivered in a multimedia format. The

thrust of this article is not about the software and its

development that underpin interactive multimedia case

studies but rather the rationale that engendered them.