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Academic staff: Teaching with case studies

Business case studies outline fictitious or real-life scenarios faced by sectors and industries, managers and companies. As an academic you have access to case study databases that provide free to use case studies in your teaching.  Library and Learning Services also support you if you would like to obtain a case study from the Case Centre or Harvard Business Cases.

The resources available are listed below.  Please select a tab to find out more about the specific resource.

The SAGE Business Cases database is a platform that provides access to over 2,500 business case studies, which cover a variety of topics and industries focusing on global brands and companies.
Subjects covered includes:

  • Human Resource Management
  • Marketing
  • Operations Management
  • Corporate Social Responsibility
  • Entrepreneurship ... and many more

Information for Lecturers

SAGE Business Cases provides teaching notes for academics. These suggest teaching strategies, target audience and possible responses to discussion questions that can help facilitate classroom discussion.

To access the teaching notes, you will require an access code. Please email n.dennis@aston.ac.uk to obtain this.

You will then need to have a personal profile set up on the Sage Knowledge platform. You can set this up by clicking on “My Profile” which is located in top right hand corner of Sage platform screen. In the “My Profile” tab, you need to enter your details and then tick the box next to “SAGE Business Cases Instructor Access” and enter the access code. This should then mean when you try and view any teaching notes associated to a case study, you will now have access.

Please note not all case studies have teaching notes attached to them.

Henry Stewart Talks Ltd (HSTalks) is a leading provider of specially prepared, animated, online, audio-visual lectures, seminar-style talks and case studies for medical schools, business schools universities and commercial enterprises in over 60 countries around the world.

Quick Start Help Guide

You can embed a talk in to Blackboard, a PowerPoint presentation, Word document, or an email. Once you choose to embed you have the following options:

You can embed a link/thumbnail to your application by highlighting the thumbnail (either manually or by clicking ‘select preview’) and then use the keyboard to copy & paste it into your application.  Alternatively, you can drag and drop the thumbnail directly into your application.

You can embed a video of the talk by copying and pasting the HTML code in to your application.

For more information please view the guides below:

Case Centre

Discover the world's largest (148,500+ items) and most diverse collection of management cases, articles, book chapters and teaching materials.  All items can be found and ordered in product search. Most items are available electronically for instant delivery.

To assist with selecting an item to use in class the Case Centre also offer a range of benefits for educators, including free online preview copies and instructor materials, product usage data, and a review facility. Personally register with the Case Centre to make use of the additional support resources.

To purchase for class teaching

Please contact lis_readinglist@aston.ac.uk with the following information:

  1. Name of case
  2. Module code
  3. Module name
  4. Number of students (* this is important as the requirement will be to purchase an access licence for each student on the module)
  5. Teaching Period(s) case required

Requesting the case for a new academic year

Please note, if you require the case again for a new academic year, you must alert lis_readinglist@aston.ac.uk so that the team can renew the licence arrangement with the case centre.

 

Harvard Business Cases

To purchase for class teaching

Please contact lis_readinglist@aston.ac.uk with the following information:

  1. Name of case
  2. Module code
  3. Module name
  4. Number of students (* this is important as the requirement will be to purchase an access licence for each student on the module)
  5. Teaching Period(s) case required

Requesting the case for a new academic year

Please note, if you require the case again for a new academic year, you must alert lis_readinglist@aston.ac.uk so that the team can renew the licence arrangement with the case centre.

Access Business Source Complete and enter your topic within the search box.

To ensure you are only accessing case studies then add another search line with "case studies" and change the drop down option to search within Subject Terms. e.g.

To find case studies in ProQuest, click the Advanced Search link under the search box on the main page. Once you're in Advanced Search

  1. Scroll down the page to Document Type, and select Case Study from the menu.
  2. Scroll back up the page and enter your search terms.

 

Case studies on companies and industries are sometimes used with academic textbooks. The names of the case studies are usually highlighted in the contents page of the textbook.

Option 1: Use Library Search to find a print textbook on your main topic.  Look through the contents page of the book to see if the Author used case studies as examples. 

Option 2: Go to the books tab of the LibGuide and search within the e-book databases. You can search within the full text of the books on the database.

 

Case studies
WARC publishes cases studies of marketing excellence from all over the world, covering every marketing discipline. WARC’s Knowledge content includes our popular Best Practice series of ‘How to’ and ‘What we know about’ papers, a monthly Admap report on specific themes and topics, as well as a growing collection of Trend Snapshots. Together, these offer guidance, advice and insight on a vast array of marketing, advertising, technology and media topics.