Confronting Student Distrust: Unexpected Findings from a Five-Week Business Intelligence Course

In spring 2024, the Goizueta Business librarians at Emory University were invited to develop and teach a 10-hour, for-credit BBA Senior Seminar workshop. This experience gave the librarians an opportunity to scaffold content across a five-session series and to tackle the challenge of providing graduating undergraduate business students with the skills to conduct credible business research via Google when faced with limited access to databases on the job. Each session allowed the students to explore business intelligence frameworks around who owns information, as well as strategies for targeting credible sources and for sifting through the “noise” in Google’s returned results. The final session included a discussion about using generative AI versus Google for business research. Interspersed throughout each session were various exercises to test the students’ knowledge. During this process, the librarians learned many unexpected and difficult lessons about the best methods for engaging with undergraduate business students. In particular, the students were extremely reluctant to buy into business intelligence research methodologies and distrusted the librarians’ expertise as information professionals. The experience of teaching this class shook the business librarians’ confidence and unsettled most of their assumptions about the best methods for teaching business undergraduates.