Article Preview
TopIntroduction
Traditional business schools are under increased pressure to respond to the growing demands from businesses, governments, and students or lose market share to alternative providers of business education (e.g., for profit institutions, MOOCs). Some of the factors driving this shift include globalization, student demographics, sustainability and enabling technology (Ain, 2010; Martin, 2011; Rusinko, 2010):
Many domains of business will require new approaches that collectively amount to a new model for business practice. Articulating and mastering these new models will require a significant shift in management education. The imperatives of 1) viewing planning as learning and reinvention rather than as prediction or control, 2) framing complex business problems through multiple disciplinary lenses, and 3) recognizing the importance of intuition and seasoned judgment, are just some of the elements that a new paradigm of business education needs to include (Schoemaker, 2008).
To meet these ongoing challenges the management education community is engaged in a significant overhaul of curricula, delivery modalities and focus (Bruner, 2011; Doh, 2010; Kleiman, 2007; Mamum, 2009).
This reformation builds on the same networking and computing systems that revolutionized global commerce in the 1990s and 2000s. Integrating the Internet with the new learning technologies now makes it possible for schools of business to offer a variety of customized programs on a global basis. Two critical tasks in this process are the development of high quality curricula and content that can be delivered in a reliable manner and that will be accepted by students (Kao, 2011). Learning Management Systems (LMS) can provide the student with a customized curriculum delivered at a convenient time and place (Dykman, 2008; Ping, 2008; Yoon, 2010):
When students are learning online, there are multiple opportunities to exploit the power of technology for formative assessment. The same technology that supports learning activities gathers data in the course of learning that can be used for assessment. As students work, the system can capture their inputs and collect evidence of their problem-solving sequences (Bienkowski, 2012).