Management education has come a long way since Sir Isaac Pitman initiated the first correspondence course in the early 1840s. Today the demands from a globalized economy are causing a sea change in the way business education is being delivered. The traditional one-size-fits-all educational approach of the past is being replaced with a customized and flexible learning paradigm that focuses on student outcomes and performance. Management education collaboration networks can assist in this transformation. A primary function of a collaboration network is to provide the management education community with access to curriculum innovation, databases, cloud computing resources, mobile learning technologies and implementation strategies. The network design should be based on stakeholder attitudes, new learning technologies, globalization, changing demographics and sustainability. The purpose of this article is to highlight the results of a global survey on collaboration networks and to outline the role of cloud-based collaboration in the future of business education.
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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).