Curricula: Reengineering for Relevance

Unlike most disciplines, business education continually strives for relevance. In a narrow sense it deals with elements of everyday commerce. But, as Rakesh Khurana argues in his recent book “From Higher Aims to Hired Hands” (Princeton University Press, 2007) the purpose of a business education has evolved to the development of professionals. He argues that business schools need to rededicate themselves to the idea of managers as professionals who are “the primary link between the narrower concerns of business and the broader ones of society.”

Khurana is not the first to complain about the direction of management education. And his views and those of others strike a chord with most educators in business schools. In recent years, Stanford, MIT, and Harvard–arguably the best business schools–have all made significant changes to their curricula. Further, to generate a more general response from a broader array of schools to criticisms of lack of relevance, the AACSB International Board of Directors created a Management Education Task Force. Their white paper “Management Education at Risk,” published in 2002, emphasized that broad content and fundamental analytical skills remain important. But, they suggested, in order to stay relevant, business schools must take several steps, notably: continually experiment with changing technologies; employ action-learning and technology-enhanced pedagogy; achieve diversity in composition of students and faculty; develop interpersonal, leadership and communication skills; institute outward-facing curricula and experiential education with significant input from faculty members familiar with business, focus less on the researcher as teacher staffing model; and blur boundaries between departments

At the Saunders College we have embraced these suggestions. Here are some examples:
• Experimenting with changing technologies – professors are teaching classes using Second Life and social networking tools such as Ning.
• Action-learning and technology-enhanced pedagogy – more than a third of professors use interactive simulations. A simulation created at the Saunders College is being used by the Indian Institute of Technology – Khozikode in a student competition.
• Diversity in composition of students and faculty – more than thirty percent of students are from other countries and twenty-five percent of faculty come from outside the US. Overall, seventy percent have international experience.
• Interpersonal, leadership and communication skills – several classes involve teams working on projects. Results must be presented to clients.
• Outward-facing curricula and experiential education – projects deal with problems critical to organizations around Rochester. One example: Excellus, an insurance company in the Upstate New York region, saw an opportunity for introducing a limited-benefit health insurance plan. A student team collected data and suggested attractive product features, price points and so on. Excellus adopted many of their recommendations and had a highly successful product launch.
• Faculty members familiar with business – Twenty-five percent of the full-time faculty have earned their stripes in the business world as entrepreneurs and managers. Overall eighty-five percent have business experience they bring to the classroom.
• Blurring boundaries across departments – the business school eliminated the department structure. Recently faculty with backgrounds in MIS, Entrepreneurship and Marketing joined to define a new area – digital entrepreneurship. Today, two cross-disciplinary task forces are deep into revising the core curriculum.

Still, curricular change relies on the enthusiasm of a student-centered faculty. On one recent afternoon a visitor walking through the building would have seen an MIS and Management professor in deep conversation with a student team, a Finance faculty member holding an impromptu tutorial for three students, an Accounting professor visible through the open door to his office explaining a fine point to a student, and so on. Ultimately, it is this enthusiasm for student learning that drives the faculty to design and deliver a challenging and relevant curriculum.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 5:46 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.