The challenge is to adapt in a way that maintains the aspiration of a borderless education, while steering our technological systems away from the impersonal
Mark Dawson, director of digital education and senior teaching fellow, Lancaster University Management School, UK “I think the challenge here is to embrace the potential of digital education in a post-Covid world, while still retaining that intimacy of face-to-face teaching. I’m not sure that the technologies are there for that yet, but that is hopefully where we are heading. “The challenge is to adapt in a way that maintains the aspiration of a borderless education, while trying to steer our technological systems away from the impersonal and towards a more intimate, challenging space for education to happen.” Steven De Haes, dean & professor of information systems governance & management, Antwerp Business School, Belgium “At Antwerp Business School, our full-time MBA-type programmes and our executive MBA are primarily geared towards intensive face-to-face interactive learning experiences, supported by a hybrid mix of online synchronous and asynchronous learning formats. I think impactful is the key word here. “The whole conversation that we are currently having should not be about the technology itself, but rather about how we can amplify the impact of the learning experience towards the student – and of course – technology is a very powerful instrument in terms of amplifying that impact. “Along with amplifying the learning impact, technology opens opportunities to more easily reach the global market. At this moment in time, we already have more than 44 different nationalities on our full-time master’s programme, so being and thinking global is already, and has always been, in our DNA. We continue to fully focus and invest in the global outreach and impact.
about 85 per cent of our students who are local, they are here for networking – that’s a big draw for them and creates a big demand. That is usually the reason they are coming to the programme because they really want the face-to-face interaction.” “We have actually taken that direction – we don’t have that many international students at the moment. Those who are international, they live here and they work here – its more or less always in‑house. Because everyone lives locally, we have decided not to offer any online streaming of classes next year.” Yasmina Kashouh, head of international programmes and academics at College de Paris International, France “Essentially, we did something different, mainly due to the fact we have a large portfolio of schools around the world and we support portfolio enlargement by adding programmes to the local offer of our international partners. “Our strategy was very clear: we move the programme – we don’t move the campus and we don’t move the students. So we worked with our partners to combine local operations with our strategy. Within these programmes, we use traditional on‑the-ground sessions with the online sessions to support our reach locally. “We had a lot of challenges when students had to come to study internationally in France. We had the rise of the cost of transportation, visa issues, political instability, Covid – we also had issues with international forms of finance, something that complicated the payments from our students. “The strategy we use is to move the operation itself – we produce our programme locally and then we can blend together online and on the ground.”
20 | Ambition | FEBRUARY 2023
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