Innovating Business Education

Recently a meeting was held among the AACBE accredited member institutes, government leaders and corporate representatives to discuss how technology should drive innovation in the nation and international business schools.

Currently, the business schools of today are faced by the challenge of equipping schools and teachers with new equipment and instructional strategies, gauging the progress of new teaching approaches, and scaling up proven strategies.

This is also discussed in the book titled ‘Disrupting Class’ written by Clayton Christensen. The authors reached their conclusions not by studying schools, but rather by studying innovation in business. They stood outside the public education industry to examine its problems from a different perspective. The book is an excellent read that AACBE also suggest all its accredited member institutes to read. The book has conveyed five major messages:

• Few education reforms have addressed the root cause of students’ inability to learn. Most attempts have not been guided by an understanding of the root reasons for why the system functions as it does, or how to predictably introduce innovation into it.
• School reformers have repeatedly tried to confront the status quo head-on. The authors’ previous studies of innovation showed that direct attacks on existing systems do not lead to effective disruptive innovation. Instead, innovation must go around and underneath the system.
• We know that all children learn differently, but the way schooling is currently arranged discourages educating children in customized ways. We need a modular system.
• Emerging online user networks offer a model for circumventing the education system and creating a new, modular system that facilitates customization. Decentralized user networks democratize development and purchase decisions to the end users in the system—in this case students, parents, and teachers.
• To facilitate innovation administrators will have to use the tools of power and separation. Using these tools is easiest in the chartered and private school sectors.

Online universities and online courses are best suited to students need as they offer the most customized and focused student centric education and instruction. The book suggests that online institutes should designate one person hose job should be to implement online courses. He or she should not be the chief information officer or info technologies officer. She or he should report directly to the principal or district superintendent. She or he should not have responsibilities for the rest of instruction in the school, but instead should be free to take any steps necessary to import online courses to meet students’ needs.

AACBE accredited member institutes should also conduct a research on how different people learn, how to identify those differences, and how different students can best educate themselves and each other and then implement strategies to make the students successful.

Note for Teacher Training Colleges:

Future teachers should have skills to work one-on-one with different types of learners as they study in a student-centric way. Business schools must also train researchers to go beyond doing descriptive research that seeks average tendencies. Instead, they should study the anomalies and outliers, where the richest insight often is found. 

Note for Teachers and Parents:

When your school does not offer a course students need, seek them online and demand that their schools accept them for credit.

“Schooling can and should be an intrinsically motivating experience,” Christensen says. Why has this often not been the case? How to resolve these problems? Explaining why and how is the purpose of this book.