digitalisation initiatives so that their students benefit from the expertise and dynamic teaching of professors on campuses around the globe. Edhec is proud to be a founding member of the FOME Alliance and to help drive its success. “As individual schools, alliance members are too small and no one school has all the expertise or resources necessary, but together they are able to tackle the challenges of meeting learners’ needs in the digital space,” notes Barniville. “During the pandemic, alliance schools quickly formed very interesting workgroups, which saved members significant time and money. Instead of emergency solutions, many FOME members were able to re-engineer their courses to use course material they already had in the pipeline.” The partnerships that Edhec forged with schools such as Johns Hopkins University and Singapore Management University, both members of FOME, helped it navigate the pandemic, while also allowing the school to launch its own 100 per cent digital learning platform in 2018. Since its creation, Edhec Online has trained 2,000 students from 51 countries. Today, it oers 132 courses, six certificates and MOOCs and seven degrees. The completion rate for students is 96 per cent. This innovative learning platform is run by 107 faculty members, career coaches and academic mentors and managed by 40 full-time administrative sta. Building on experience Digital learning platforms such as Edhec Online are examples of what is to come. Soon, business schools could use digitalised content to give students the tailor-made content or modular learning that they need to take on a new project at work, or make a move to another department within their organisation. “Digital allows us to consider if someone else has already created content that is better than what we could create ourselves,” comments Barniville. “It allows for business schools to decide where they can deliver quality and impact.” For many schools, the digital revolution, and all that comes with it, will result in 100 per cent blended degree programmes, which, in the end, will be more respectful of each learner’s needs. We all know some learning objectives are more easily absorbed in a self-paced environment and blended programmes allow learners to study at their own pace in the setting of their choice, be that plane, train or outdoor terrace. They will also provide face-to-face teaching time that will be used to stimulate behaviour change. In the near future, Lefevre envisions a learning environment where AI dictates what happens in the classroom, not professors. “AI is radical, crazy stu,” he says. “Today, we have a human system that is supported by AI and humans still call the shots in the classroom. But true AI teaching would flip that, with technology calling the shots and humans supporting the technology when it gets stuck.” Lefevre also cautions that this is probably not the type of AI that most business schools will adopt. Instead, he predicts that AI-led teaching will be used to democratise learning in low-income zones, but that it will not be used for MBA or other business master’s programmes because of their hi-touch needs.
machine learning, things are moving in the right direction. Online education has been around for 20 years, but we have yet to significantly change the type of degrees and learning formats that we oer online. The ‘Big Bang’ moment for learning via the internet was probably in 2008, with the creation of the first massive open online courses (MOOCs), and we’re still a way o from that radical MOOC moment with machine learning and extreme digitalisation. A digital mind shift One of the biggest challenges for business schools in the digital age will be creating a 100 per cent learner-centric environment. Currently, we still develop programmes to fill gaps in expertise and then seek out students to fill these programmes. But as we move deeper into digitalisation, we must flip this mindset and figure out how to create 100 per cent student-driven courses. At Edhec Business School we started moving into the digital sphere in the 2000s; we’re still gaining insights from our early initiatives and shifting our thinking from “we have a programme” to “we have a learner.” The same is probably true for you and your school. You’ve probably made a push into the digital age but feel that there’s still a lot more to accomplish, which can be a frustrating state of aairs. As an industry, higher education adapts to change at glacial speed and while some schools may push ahead, our sector tends to be cautious. This is why Lefevre believes that the MOOC moment for AI will take place outside of the business school environment. However, he’s still not giving up on the industry’s potential for bold moves. “Even if the digital transition is slow moving, it is coming,” he warns, adding: “and you don’t want to be left behind.” Gaining confidence One of Edhec’s first digital projects was the creation of a learning management system to share course content across campuses in Lille, Paris, Nice, London and Singapore. This experience opened our eyes to the possibilities digital technologies oered and we were eager to tackle other initiatives. In 2011, we created an online bachelor’s degree for high-performing athletes, including some Olympians, who needed extreme flexibility regarding course participation, assessments and exams, as well as workplace experience. This programme’s success emboldened us to move further into the digital sphere and, in 2018, we joined a small group of top-tier international business schools looking to better serve students and their employers via digital education. “It was a group of people who truly believed that digitally delivered learning could be as good if not better than face-to-face learning,” recalls Nick Barniville, founder of GomeraTech, an edtech consulting firm, who served as associate dean of programmes at ESMT Berlin at the time of the group’s creation. The process of working together to create a new digital learning model forged strong bonds between the schools and they went on to form the Future of Management Education Alliance (FOME). Alliance members share learning content and best practice around
20 | Ambition APRIL 2023
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