Students aged between 15 and 30 are in the Y generation or the Millennial Generation. They grew up immersed in new technologies. Instant messaging, watching videos, reading the news, listening to music or social networks like Facebook or Twitter are all the things they do on a daily basis, with an internet connexion. When new evolution of technology emerges like smartphones and Tablets, they know how to use it easily and regularly. This new generation wants to use multimedia at school. Now, it is a very difficult challenge for each teacher to grab the attention of students with only lectures and case study. They demand that higher education changes its lecturing styles, making use of new technologies.
Business schools have already evolved by equipping classrooms with material that enables to make a PowerPoint Presentation, show videos or websites but they do not use multimedia enough. There are some business schools that try new method to make a full use of media material, like Bason and Duke’s Fuqua School of Business that are experimenting video conferencing system that enables to invite a guest speaker, who would be on different location in the world or use this technology to enable discussion with off-campus student.
The video conference looks like that
Source : http://computers-plus.us/hardware-lab/duke-university-extends-global-learning-with-cisco-telepresence-lecture-hall
Another example is Tom Smith, Assistant Professor of Finance at Emory’s Goizueta School of Business, who asked students to take their laptop for his course on macroeconomics. Students were asked to download official government data from the web, drawing a graph and make some basic calculation, which would help them understand better the lecture, while attending it.
A last example is Professor Carboni, who uses often videos in his lectures on organisational behaviour. In a lesson on leadership style, he provides students with examples as a half time speech of a basketball coach Bobby Knight found on Youtube, which would be similar to this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw7KijRfU-c/ .
Professors could use the technology just for entertainment purposes and not only to improve the learning experience, therefore business schools have to be careful about how to use new technology.
In my opinion, universities and business schools should make more often use of new technology. The challenge will be to have a good balance of the various ways of lecturing. If two-hour lecture made of theory provided by the lecturer, would be liven up video that relates to the subject and provides examples or illustrates a point, if a debate was made in the class room, a guest speaker invited for a case study would through data, help improvement and to me, this would be an ideal lecture, helping enriching my experience.
Very interesting piece and I completely agree. I think, like you mention as well, that technology advancement is particularly important to make use of in a learning environment. Especially for business schools. As future business leaders, business students learning how to communicate and use technology in everything from lectures to specific presentations make them more competitive in their future careers.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, not only does it capture the students and increase the interaction and attention in class, technology allows for discussions, presentations and seminars to go beyond the physical classroom. This is a very interesting thought, not only for novel ways of reaching out to students but also in terms of international education. Study period abroad programs and international co-operation on university projects could greatly benefit for more practical application of available technology.