Living Case Studies and Their Usefulness in Bringing Hands-on Practical Experience into the Classroom

In higher education, there is an increasing trend to bring hands-on practical experience into the classroom in order to activate students and not only boost their skills in acquiring and reproducing theoretical knowledge but applying it to solve real-world problems. One way to achieve this is experiential learning - and more specifically - the use of traditional case studies in the classroom, where the performance of students working on them is part of their course examination. However, they get easily outdated and really good case studies tend to be used too often with a danger of inventive students reusing knowledge from their predecessors so that there is a constant struggle to find new or rewrite existing ones. This in turn comes along with spending a lot of time on preparation of teaching material and having less left for research activities etc. One way to get out of this is to employ real living case studies where a fixed scenario of a real-world problem can be kept up-to-date rather easily with the danger of reusing previous work of other students being minimized at the same time. Research approach: This is a conceptual paper based on the author's own teaching experience in the field of logistics and supply chain management where two sorts of such real living case studies have been established successfully so far: On the one hand, calculative case studies in road haulage, inland-navigation and/or logistics service provision based on effective cost calculation and on the other hand structured assignments assessing country environment risks or customs treatment and packaging requirements of commodities being exported or imported in the context of the European Union. In both cases, publicly available data resources are exploited to create ever new problem statements for the students. In the paper, concrete examples of such real living case studies are shown and key components of scenario design as well as success factors are outlined.