April 19, 1999
Theme: The Technology Revolution in Management Education
It is an honour to address this AACSB meeting. I am particularly pleased that David Asch is on the platform with me. David has done a superb job as the Open University’s second Dean of Business. He took over from Andrew Thomson, our founding dean and a great academic entrepreneur, six years ago. The School has gone from strength to strength under David’s skilled strategic guidance and enormously energetic leadership.
It is easy to say that the Open University’s Graduate Business School is the largest in Western Europe. What pleases me just as much are the School’s 10,000 plus students in the former Soviet bloc. Since the breach of the Berlin Wall no institution has made a greater contribution than the OU Business School to education in modern management in that huge and important region of the world. I would also like to challenge this distinguished gathering to tell me if any of your schools can also claim as an alumnus a serving head of state who successfully undertook an MBA degree while holding the country’s supreme office. David was one of the OU tutors for the president in question and found it an enormously stimulating experience.
David has now handed over the reins of the Open University Business School to Professor Roland Kaye. I am delighted that Roland is here with us in Atlanta and I know that he looks forward to getting to know his fellow deans in the AACSB community. Roland also brings great energy and flair to the job and will have the particular responsibility for developing the OU Business School’s activities in this country within the framework of the United States Open University which begins teaching later this year.
I address you with trepidation this morning. There are two reasons. The first is that according to everything I have heard AACSB is an immensely serious organization that takes itself immensely seriously. The comparison that comes to mind is Scotland’s proud McLeod clan, whose grace before meals is:
Lord, help us to be slightly worthy of the esteem in which we hold ourselves.
I shall therefore try to be very serious and I apologise in advance if levity occasionally breaks through.
The second reason for my trepidation is that I fear that you and I may have very different views about the nature of quality in higher education in general and in management education in particular. For hundreds of years universities have defined quality in terms of exclusivity. I mean especially the exclusiveness of their student intake in terms of family income or previous schooling but also the exclusiveness created by the age and wealth of the university itself. It is the proud boast of the Open University to have cut that insidious link between quality and exclusivity of input and replaced it by a link between quality and effectiveness of output.
Deep in their hearts most universities – and I suspect particularly most business schools – have not made that vital conceptual jump. We may be in danger of conducting a dialogue of the deaf.
So I speak to you with some trepidation but I take heart from two straws that I see flying in the wind.
First, I was struck by your Association’s letterhead. It reads AACSB – The International Association for Management Education. AACSB is not spelled out but I think that ‘American’ was once in there somewhere. Now you are international.
Is this merely cultural imperialism? Perish the thought.
Does it describe a reality? Hardly.
From the March 5 list of registrations less than 10% of the delegates to this conference are from outside the USA. It’s a good rule of thumb that a body should feel uneasy about calling itself international if more than 50% of its membership comes from any one country.
So is the new name aspirational? I imagine it must be and that is what encourages me. If you do aspire really to become the International Association for Management Education sometime in the next millennium then you will have to swing the focus of quality judgements from exclusiveness to effectiveness. On one estimate there could be 150 million university students in the world of 2020. On present trends up to one third of them, say 50 million souls, might study management as part of their programs. An approach based on high cost and exclusiveness won’t cut the muster in that environment.
The second encouraging straw in the wind is the theme of this conference, The Technology Revolution in Management Education, and the title of this session, Technology’s Impact on Cognition. I suppose that one could use technology to reinforce exclusiveness. Giving every student a top-of-the-line laptop computer could simply be a ruse to give them a foretaste of the fancy foreign motor cars to which they may aspire when they are successful in business. But if that is the only aim there must more impressive positional goods that you could dish out. Therefore I presume that you are asking whether technology can effect within management education the transformations it has effected in other fields of human endeavour.
What are those transformations? Simply that the use of technology makes things more available, improves their quality, reduces their cost, and increases flexibility and choice. The automobile is a good example. Today more people have a wider choice of cheaper and better cars than they did when Henry Ford rolled out the Model T.
You teach this stuff in your schools so I needn’t belabor the point, except to note that information technology reinforces these transformations. The CEO of the company pilots a Mercedes and the guy on the shop floor drives a Chevy. But when they go home and get onto the Internet the chances are they will both be using the same software.
We may muse about whether management education is more like automobiles or more like software but the real point is the technological transformation.
I assume, therefore, that you are ready to subscribe to the goal of making management education cheaper, better, more accessible and more flexible all at the same time. That’s what encourages me and makes me think that you are ready to accept other measures of quality than exclusivity.
This session has a very serious title: Technology’s Impact on Cognition. Cognition is a fancy word meaning knowing. Technology obviously has an impact on knowing. Because I used the technology of television last evening I know the latest about in the terrible fiasco and disaster in Kosova. But here at this AACSB meeting I think you should be more ambitious than just knowing.
I believe that the word collegiate also figured in the former title of AACSB, meaning that your schools of business are either in or associated with universities. What are the implications of that? What is different or special about universities – except that as deans of business you often have to do battle with their presidents who, like your spouses, don’t understand you?
We’ve just had a Commission of Enquiry on higher education in the United Kingdom.
In its report it proposed that the role of universities is ‘to enable society to maintain an independent understanding of itself and its world’. Let’s unpack that statement.
It focuses on society, not the nation, because this is a global world. University teaching can now cross national borders in the way that research has always done.
It talks about maintaining an understanding, not communicating an understanding, because things change, each society is in flux, theories evolve, understanding develops.
The definition talks about ‘understanding of itself’ because the understanding reached must be widely owned and disseminated. Understanding is not the preserve of an elite, but of a learning society.
The word independent is there to capture the unique role of universities as creators of understanding. In a knowledge society many claim the right to help us interpret and understand the world. However, most of those claimants: the media; industrial and government research centres; think tanks; and the new breed of corporate and for-profit universities cannot be independent of commercial and political interests. The individualistic and disinterested nature of the true university remains unique.
Finally, understanding means going beyond information, it means going beyond knowledge, it means knowledge acquired with the sense of responsibility for how it comes to be known that can make it the foundation for action.
If that is the role of the university what must be the style of university learning? It must not stop at the transmission of information, nor at the communication of knowledge. It means the development of understanding.
Understanding is an iterative process involving a dialogue with oneself and others that moves toward a shared understanding. That shared understanding carries with it a critical distance leading eventually to a personal perspective from which learners take responsibility for what they know, how they came to know it and where they may properly apply it. Put another way, knowledge alone is insufficient, university education implies an understanding of the nature of knowledge.
We must recognise that from this perspective much of what universities now do, and, dare I say it, even some of what business schools do, is not university work.
I hasten to say that I do not blame you and I do not blame universities for this. Our societies have urged us to inculcate simple skills and to transmit well-codified knowledge and we have eagerly complied. Such activities have, however, obscured the core role of universities and encouraged a host of new players, who may well be better than established universities at teaching straightforward skills and knowledge, to call themselves universities and move into the field. But exploring that phenomenon is another talk for another day and I’ve already offended enough people in this room.
Let me comment instead on technology’s impact on understanding. As business deans you are practical and pragmatic people who are content to leave to others the task of philosophizing about higher education in the tradition of John Henry Newman. But you should take understanding seriously because the performance of your graduates has a big impact on the community.
If history graduates don’t have a critical distance and don’t take responsibility for what they know, how they came to know it and where they may properly apply it we just get bad history books. If your graduates don’t operate at that level of understanding we will have perilous products, collapsing companies, and shattered shareholders. How can technology help? There is good news and bad news.
The bad news is that technology presents threats to universities as well as opportunities. What are they?
First, new technology makes it easier to access information. But remember that university teaching is much more than this.
Second, technology tends to drive the curriculum towards skills rather than knowledge and understanding.
Third, technology is best exploited by teams whereas universities emphasise the creativity of the individual academic.
What is the best response to the opportunities and the most effective answer to the threats posed by technology?
It is to take a more exalted view of technology than is usual in the current frenetic discourse about on-line education. I mean this in two ways. First to take a more exalted view of what hardware and software can do in developing individual understanding. Second to take a more sophisticated of the role of technology in enhancing institutional effectiveness.
Take individual understanding. This is a complex topic, too complex for a university president talking to a group of deans on a Monday morning.
For detail I refer you to Diana Laurillard’s book Rethinking University Teaching. I understand that I am substituting for Diana who was, rightly because she is very lucid on this subject, your first choice for this keynote.
Her approach to technology for understanding is based on conversation theory. Let me try to give you the flavor of that, simply to show you that this does answer the criticism recently levelled at technology-based education in a petition by 900 faculty at the University of Washington who said:
“Education is not reducible to the downloading of information, much less to the passive and solitary activity of staring at a screen.”
The conversational framework for the learning process in higher education insists there have to be two levels of discourse between teacher and student.
There is the discursive level where teacher and student are discussing at the level of conceptual knowledge, where a discipline formalizes and articulates what it knows. That debate about theory is what distinguishes university education from other types of learning.
But theory is related to practice and equally important is this interaction between the two levels where the teacher sets up some experiential world for the student to practice in, whether it is a field trip or a case study.
That interactive level means practising and getting feedback on how good you are. But of course these two cannot remain separate.
The teacher has to have an adaptive and reflective interaction with what they are doing, adapting the experiential world they offer the student in the light of that discourse and, equally, reflecting on that in order to improve it.
Similarly, for the student, they are adapting their actions in the case study, or whatever it is, in the light of that conceptual understanding and, equally, reflecting on that practice to further enhance and inform their conceptual knowledge.
So it is an iterative, cyclical process and it extends over time. It is this cycle of dialogue that is discursive, interactive, adaptive and reflective which distinguishes understanding in higher education.
This framework is the key to determining where technology can help understanding.
Clearly there are communicative technologies that can help at the discursive level and others that help at the adaptive level.
Let me give a few quick examples.
For the presentation of information to the student there are many media. Browsing the Web is a new one. It’s good for presenting information and access is quick, but it’s not interactive and it doesn’t give feedback. It’s like a lecture.
If we want the student to present information we often set a written assignment, for which they will usually use a word processor. But why not give them more scope to present with PowerPoint or Toolbook?
The dialogue between teacher and student is vital in higher education. Today this can be a web-based discussion or computer conference, and the asynchronous nature of this can be an advantage, because it gives people time to think more about their contributions.
Then there are technologies which allow the student to be active and to put their conceptual learning into practice. Here running simulation programs is clearly a powerful tool which can be designed to let students practise a whole range of activities that will connect theory and practice.
What about putting this all together?
I hope its clear from this build up of activity that that is no magic technology which takes care of the whole cycle of understanding. What we need is what teachers have always needed, the technological equivalent of a blend of lectures, exercises, assignments, individual tutorials, discussions and so on.
These slides suggested that a combination of web-based discussion with simulations could take you a long way. Obviously you can go through all the available media and technologies and see how each can help with the different steps in the cycle of learning, which Diana Laurillard has done in her book. That helps you design the best learning system you can with the technologies available to you.
Which leads naturally to the institutional aspect of technology. What I’ve said about technology and individual understanding suggests that doing it well is quite a challenging process.
The next step is to realise that those processes are also a form of technology. At the Open University we define technology for our students as:
“The application of scientific and other organised knowledge to practical tasks by organisations consisting of people and machines”
This stresses that technology is more than applied science. Non-scientific knowledge, such as crafts, design, tacit knowledge and managerial skills are involved. And - very important - technology always involves people and their social systems.
So when you use technology in education, remember that the soft technologies of processes, approaches, rules and ways of organising things are just as important as the bits and bytes, the electrons and the pixels that I call the hard technologies.
The relevant soft technologies are simply the working practices that underpin the rest of today’s modern industrial and service economy: division of labour, specialisation, teamwork and project management.
These are not, of course, the traditional working practices in college teaching. There the habit is for the same individual to do everything: develop the curriculum; organise the learning resources; teach the class; provide academic support; and assess student learning. This robust, cottage-industry model does not require much organisation from you as deans. However, it also does not allow us to reconfigure the eternally challenging triangle of cost-access-quality in the directions of lower costs, greater access and higher quality.
So the key to harnessing the technology revolution successfully in management education is a shift in the locus of responsibility.
The simplest way of putting it is that in traditional universities the individual teaches whereas in supported open learning the university teaches.
Supported Open Learning is the term we use at the Open University for our very successful approach to using technology in teaching and learning.
It has four key ingredients:
1) excellent learning materials;
2) individual academic support to each student;
3) effective administration and logistics; and
4) teaching rooted in research.
The remarkable success of the Open University Business School is based on the skilled application of these soft technologies as a framework for some leading edge use of hard technologies.
David Asch and Roland Kaye can tell you what makes them so proud of the Open University Business School.
For me it is the tremendous impact that comes from the combination of quality and scale and the fact that it is as genuinely international as any business school can claim to be.
In the UK we have a national, state-supervised system of assessment of the quality of teaching of each discipline in each university. The quality of teaching in the Open University Business School is rated excellent under this system.
Then when you combine that with the numbers involved, you find that fully one-third of all students in England taking excellent-rated business programs are with the Open University. That is a staggering figure.
I suggested earlier that a body should hesitate to call itself international if more than half its members come from any single country. The Open University Business School is not there yet, but with 8,000 of its 25,000 students resident outside the UK we have nearly reached one third so we can claim at least a growing internationalism.
Let me conclude this very brief survey of technology’s impact on cognition, or as I prefer it, understanding. I have made several points.
First, I don’t think it’s worth getting involved in trying to harness technology in any serious way unless you are prepared to define success in terms of outputs rather than inputs and unless you are at least somewhat attracted by the technological dynamic that leads to lower costs, greater accessibility, greater flexibility and more consistent quality of output. For some of you that will not be attractive. The world needs diversity and I wish you well if you want to continue to define quality as exclusivity. What does seem to me immoral is to do that and create a for-profit operation on the side to try and follow the technological dynamic. But that’s another debate and I suspect that such attempts will end in tears anyway.
Second, I tried to explain the concepts of conversation theory and apply them to using technology in higher education. My exposition was entirely at the discursive level and if you want to understand it you’ll need to engage in some interactive and adaptive follow-up in your own time.
Third, I suggested that the really important technologies for change are the technologies of process and that the key principles here are very different from the individualistic tradition of universities.
Finally, I made brief mention of the success of the Open University Business School which shows that none of what I’ve talked about is fantasy. David and Roland can tell you more.
For my parting words I’d like to assure you that none of these approaches is in anyway damaging to the tradition of academic freedom or the great ideal, which has inspired my career, of the academic mode of thinking. It is my observation over many years that the team approach to course development and the involvement of well-trained and motivated associate faculty in providing interaction, support and advice to students produces an academic community that is more vibrant than you find on campus.
Supported open learning is absolutely in the millennial tradition of universities.
I say this because the temptation for the new ‘for-profit’ universities in this country is to pervert some of these processes by removing their academic backbone. Referring to academics as ‘content experts’ is the surest indicator that an organisation has fallen for this trend.
All I ask is that you use your critical faculties to distinguish between the many new trends at work in management education.
What I predict is that if you use it well and remain true to your academic values technology can substantially help the AACSB and its members, sometime in the next century, to achieve their ambition of becoming the International Association for Management Education.