As he enters a good-for-forty-people classroom, he searches for the seat farthest from the whiteboard. His signature on the course attendance sheet is supposed to signify his being present in that day’s class, but his blank stares, which barely recognize the bullets in the PowerPoint slide flashed on the white screen, prove otherwise. His mind is similar to a high-tech browser powered by fiber-fast internet—multiple tabs of thought categorized by extra-curricular schedules, social activities after school, and random distractions from a seemingly boring lecture… all loading at the same time. As if on cue, his Facebook news feed is suddenly flooded with the funniest content and memes anyone has seen in a while, while the faculty member tries to emphasize an important point in that day’s lesson. “Anyway, everything can be searched by Google,” the student reassures himself.
Years ago, that undergraduate business student was me. Fast forward to today, I am now the faculty member witnessing another student reenact the exact experience I have lived through before. In today’s world where Google and Facebook are everyone’s know-it-all best friends and management education is not a hard prerequisite to business success (see: Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg), business schools need to ask: What are business schools for? What are business faculty for?
Finding the answer to this question is more urgent than ever in the Philippines, where we are experiencing how the K-12 program changes not only secondary education but also tertiary education as well. Our college and my academic department is continuing to explore changes in subjects, course content, and learning outcomes in preparation for 2018, where majority of the first wave of K-12 graduates will enter college. Aside from reconfiguring our existing courses, we realize that the new generation of students are very different from the previous ones. In the past, the power resides in the teacher—lecturing course content and testing the enrollees learnings. Today, the content-provider role of teachers is obsolete thanks to Google and the internet of things.
Limited attention span
In my experience, undergraduate students are not anymore as receptive as in the past in terms of the more ‘traditional’ means of teaching—lectures, group reports, reading long articles, and even watching educational videos. I have personally learned that the duration of these activities cannot exceed 20 minutes at a time, or else students start to disengage by checking their smartphones or entertaining whatever distractions they fancy.
As such, I was challenged to find other means of discussing the course content. In the previous weeks, instead of the usual reporting of case study answers (e.g. a group goes in front of the room and echoes the answers to the class), I experimented a ‘case study gallery’ approach where groups are assigned stations and other members roam around, emulating a gallery. Also, instead of lecturing content first before assigning a case, I did the reverse. I assigned the case first, let the groups present, then I gave feedback whether their understanding and application of concepts were accurate—a simulation of an ideal learning-by-doing scenario.
Prefer learning-by-doing
From these experiments, I learned that students of today are more receptive to activities that encourage interaction and rapid feedback while reconciling engaging activities with the course content. They prefer learning-by-doing over the traditional information dumping lectures tend to focus on. My most important insight is that teachers should celebrate—not lament—the fact that teaching is not anymore about faculty members relaying content. The job of Google and the internet of things is to make information more accessible, and it is intuitive enough that I find it reasonable to expect students to take care of themselves in searching for the content they need to master.
What are business schools for? What are business faculty for?
My initial answer is that business schools and faculty should pivot from relaying content to designing a true learning platform—a space, physical or digital, where students can learn applicable tools, frameworks that make sense of their intuition, and most ideally, learn how to learn. In today’s time, I realize that the ideal learning environment is not where students are sponges that absorb knowledge until they are full; rather, it is where students are experimenters that test their own ideas, fail, and learn new ones. What remains is the role of schools to be the advocates of a strong moral compass, where future managers are prepared a world of sustainability and common good.
To end, I share to you a quote by best-selling author and entrepreneur, Seth Godin:
“If you want people to become passionate, engaged in a field, transformed by an experience—you don’t test them, you don’t lecture them and you don’t force them. Instead, you create an environment where willing, caring individuals can find an experience that changes them.” – Seth Godin, ‘Will this be on the test’, www.medium.com
Patrick Adriel H. Aure is currently a faculty member of the Management and Organization Department of the Ramon V. del Rosario College of business, and is a junior research fellow of the DLSU Center for Business Research and Development. Having earned his MBA from De La Salle University, he is excited about rethinking business education and exploring cases on social enterprises, sustainability, innovation, and new business models. You can reach him at aure.patrick@gmail.com.
The views expressed here are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official position of DLSU, its faculty, and its administrators.