International education partners are an important part of the Royal Roads network. Relationships with universities around the world offer research collaboration opportunities for faculty and study exchanges for students. As Canada's university for Changemakers, Royal Roads recently expanded international education partnerships to provide custom training to fellow educators. The new offering shares the university's unique teaching approach for its Bachelor of Business Administration with partner institutions: project-based learning (PBL).
"The idea of project-based learning is that instead of sitting in a class that's all marketing, or just finance, students deal with real problems from real clients from the public and private sectors who have challenges and opportunities within their organization," explains Lee Sentes, associate faculty member in the school of business. "The clients appreciate the students' help to solve the challenges, and the decisions the students make have real impact on the clients' business."
Royal Roads is the first Canadian university to offer a Bachelor of Business Administration taught entirely through project-based learning. For Harry Nakayama, manager of global partnerships at Royal Roads, the opportunity to share this innovation with other education providers helps enhance curriculum at other universities, raises awareness of the BBA program with international students and allows current Royal Roads BBA students to continue their project-based learning while on student exchange.
"I first mentioned PBL teacher training to National Economics University who have been partners with Royal Roads since 2017 for student study exchanges when I visited them in 2023 after attending a Canada-Vietnam university partnership mission," says Nakayama. "I was exploring new opportunities to collaborate with NEU and talked about our BBA and project-based learning because it is something that makes Royal Roads unique with our international partners. I suggested PBL training for their faculty and they showed interest."
"The RRU-NEU training agreement is what we hope to be the first of many," says Paula Jamieson, manager, global learning programs. "We hope that other university partners will see the value of our innovative teaching approach and want to request a customized training program for their faculty and instructors as well."
In late 2024, Royal Roads held its first PBL training session with NEU in Hanoi with more than 30 faculty participants.
NEU faculty were keen to learn the PBL approach knowing the positive impact it has on their students' educational experience. Sentes, who delivered the inaugural training session, is quick to share the benefits: "Project-based learning provides students with real-world application of their learning over the course of their studies. Each project we bring to our BBA students typically ranges in length between three to seven weeks. So, over the 16 months of their degree program at Royal Roads, they will complete 10 to 12 different real-world problems for actual clients, proving them with valuable hands-on experience for their career."
With the success of the first teacher training session complete, Nakayama is eager to expand the sessions to other post-secondary institutions, as part of his efforts to promote Royal Roads to global learners.
"Offering PBL training is another way we can share the Royal Roads story," says Nakayama. "My hope is that we will be able to share our teaching approach with faculty from all our partner universities so that they, too, can benefit from this innovative instruction style and incorporate it into their curriculum."
But that's not Nakayama's only motivation.
"Our partnership network is comprised of global changemakers. I want to help our students make connections abroad," he says. "It may be helpful for their future activities to be connected to international changemakers. World problems are interconnected. You need to work with other countries and different parts of the world to solve them. It's important for our students to work with people from different countries, make connections, then solve world problems."
