BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
students. It’s important to acknowledge that Business Schools should also play a role in helping communities recover from human-made disasters. Recently, I was an online guest speaker for a course taught to Afghan women at the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh. These students, mostly engineers or other science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) professionals, were re-skilling to learn how to teach so that they can help develop entrepreneurial capabilities among Afghan refugees. Is the business education sector responding quickly enough to this disruption? Honestly, no. I really think that most sectors are still in major denial over the climate emergency. I wish we would galvanise our resources to address this challenge as quickly as we did during the first year of the pandemic. How did the Covid-19 pandemic change your School for the long term – and what have been your most important learnings during lockdown? Our university had already rolled out a robust online learning environment internally before the pandemic, so in a sense, we were more ready than most to switch to online-only instruction that first semester, back in 2020. The pandemic made us realise that online learning really could, and should, be a lifelong process made available to the larger population, and not just to our students. Our Learning Mall Online (LMO) is now partnering with major educational partners such as Microsoft, Huawei and Digital China to offer free and paid courses for everyone to take at their convenience, as and when relevant. I learned so much about myself and the importance of a good support network during the past two years. I had gone back to the US for a three-week vacation in January 2020 which soon turned into a nine-month sheltering situation due to Chinese border restrictions. Many of my colleagues and our international students were similarly scattered around the globe. I think I became a more empathetic person as everyone was experiencing significant levels of stress from the situation. I learned to start discussions and classes with a check-in to see how people were doing. I also realised that I really need my sleep. Since I was usually the only person on our projects stuck in the US with most in China or Europe, each week I would have several meetings in the middle of the night. I remember sometimes feeling very frustrated with myself for not articulating a point better – but, then, it was 2am for me.
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Do you think recent events have moved us to a more democratised approach to business education?
I do believe that some Business Schools are providing new offerings in a more democratised way, but more needs to be done since education is the great equaliser. XJTLU’s Learning
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