Leveraging Real Estate Education with Students’ Real-World Observations: A Diary Approach

This paper discusses how real estate education can benefit from letting students keep a scientific diary. This scientific diary approach entails that, as a complementary course activity, students keep a diary in which they reflect on any real estate related news, projects, daily observations or policies that fascinate them or attract their attention or curiosity. Personal curiosity, while a fundamental driver of science, often lacks a formal role in real estate courses. As such, diaries may help, in a modest way, to enrich the classroom as well as the teacher’s perspective on the thoughts and personal development of students. In this paper we frame specific pros and cons of the diary approach within the educational literature, whilst paying special attention to the traditional lecture approach and the recently popular flipped classroom approach. To empirically illustrate what real estate diaries may bring about, the current study offers a content analysis of the entries in diaries kept by two cohorts of students of the University of Groningen Master’s program of Real Estate Studies and a cohort of students of the George Washington University School of Business MBA program. We show results of a systematic categorization of the 200+ diary posts as to their content and form. We conclude with a discussion of the possible merits of this approach. One of these merits is a broadening of the topics that students study within the (pre-fixed) study program. Another is that recent events, impossible to be captured in textbooks and academic literature, are actively connected to. The openness of the diary approach may help to make students’ own-level thinking about real-world observations more serious, in small steps, through a process of exploration and writing. In addition, diaries can be discussed in-class in a group setting, under the teacher’s supervision, in order to share observations and discuss knowledge- claims. This practices the framing of real-world observations within existing theory as well as the assessment of whether alterations to theoretical models are needed to understand the observation at hand. We hypothesize that practice of this type of reflection on fresh issues in the ‘daily real estate life’ of students may lead to a stronger connection between their academic training and the professional field of real estate.