BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
ROUNDTABLE REVIEW
for our executive and part-time students, booking an hour’s session in person can be a challenging commitment to fit around work. “To be able to do this online made me feel a lot more connected to students. As the MBA director, it opened up all sorts of different conversations and helped me to support students much better. So that’s something we’re continuing to do even with face-to-face teaching.” Chinedum Ewuzie, MBA director, Lagos Business School: “One thing which we found to be very effective was on-the- spot quizzes. Sometimes, we might do a quiz in order to create attention and provide feedback. “Doing these online allowed us to increase participation in the quiz, and we were then able to show the results with graphs in real time. We found it can really motivate students to pay attention.” Elena Beleska-Spasova, pro-dean for education and innovation, Henley Business School: “Moving online gave us the opportunity to really engage alumni. The access we had to external speakers was great. “We built extra engagement through non-curricular events, mostly driven by our alumni team, but also our careers team in terms of fireside chats and town hall events. We were also able to develop students’ skills in areas that are not always taught in the mainstream MBA; for example, mental health. “We had really positive feedback from our students on this – it gave them a safe place to talk about certain things. So, I think that’s where online learning made a difference in engagement; in those non-curricular activities.” Marika Taishoff, MBA programme director, International University of Monaco: “I want to emphasise the personalisation aspect of online learning. I think the online experience, if it is done well, does offer a great deal of personalisation, something that we simply don’t have in a real-time classroom environment. “Some students might be a bit weak, for example, on the topic of big data, so when they are online they can always watch a video again and refresh their ideas. It allows for students who are weaker in certain areas to pace themselves in terms of learning. “I should mention that the online experience also allows us to connect with our alumni much more effectively, because we have alumni all over the world and they like to be engaged. “We’ve had special masterclasses and workshops during the pandemic, to which we invited speakers in luxury and wealth management and on entrepreneurship, because these are the areas on which our students tend to focus. With these guest speakers and workshops, we would open them to the alumni community as well. “We are now doing this on a regular basis because we can see that alumni are hungry for this lifelong learning, which was previously very difficult [to offer] when you have alumni in Singapore, Moscow or Vancouver. It’s better online. There are many benefits to the online experience. “I think we have to look at it from a positive angle and not think, ‘online is boring, it’s system learning, it’s not interactive’. We just have to adapt our approach to it and have the right tools rather than believing it’s cheaper in the long term. It’s not, because it always has
to be updated and the technologies change so rapidly. I don’t think we should look at it in terms of cost benefit, we have to look at it in terms of how we can personalise our approach to students.” Part four: The way forward To sum up the discussion, Daniel Hill, regional vice-president for EMEA at Canvas, acknowledged how the company is preparing for a blended model of learning and the areas on which it is focusing. Daniel Hill, regional vice-president EMEA, Canvas: “I think personalisation is a big thing for all of our teams internally. We have a range of teams looking at the different emerging technologies, whether that’s AI, machine learning, virtual reality or micro-credentials. “We are also looking at how students are interacting with content and whether we can recommend certain pieces of content based on their learning needs. That’s definitely something we’re interested in understanding; not so much from an in-course or in‑module perspective, but in terms of providing students with more personalisation and control over their own personal upskilling. “This could allow learners to take ownership of their learning pathway and see the kind of skills they could work on that, over time, could lead to an overall credential. “The community and the collaboration pieces are really important, but I think what’s often overlooked is that education has to be student or learner-centred. It’s all very well setting up those communities, but it’s also important to provide vehicles or tools so that those groups that naturally occur on campus can occur digitally too. “If there is a group of learners who want to meet up regularly, technology has to be set up in a way that groups can create their own virtual or digital spaces in which to communicate – but that still sits within an overarching ecosystem that the institution can manage. So, certainly these are all things that are regularly discussed at all levels of our business.”
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