ROUNDTABLE REVIEW
There’s a long list of metrics we looked at which directly correlated between the level of engagement and the success of the student
Part 3: Opportunities and success stories Having talked about the opportunities and limitations of engagement data, the discussion moved to how participants saw their business schools adapting to coming back to campus, while keeping those elements of online learning that worked well. Debbie Kemp, MBA director, Kent Business School: “I think the most obvious positive to come out of online learning was the opportunities for guest lectures and for alumni engagement. All of a sudden, you were not constrained by needing somebody to come to your physical institution and this gave us the opportunity to talk to people from around the world who were willing to share their experiences.’ We will continue to have our MBA guest lecture series online even though we’ve gone back to face-to-face teaching and, in doing this, we have captured a much wider audience of students and alumni. I found academic advising online was a real success. Some students like to come and see you in person, but particularly 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.”
We also built an online learning committee which was responsible for ensuring that all the students were engaged with their studies and that no students were facing any trouble. We made shorter segments of lectures and sent out interactive videos to all students to allow them to better understand the chapters and lectures. We started a partnership with a professional filming studio in Geneva, called Dukascopy TV. We sent our professors to record their sessions in this impressive environment. We also encouraged collaborative projects, so that students could have real-life scenarios to help them emerge in real-world applications of their learning.” Thabang Mokoaleli-Mokoteli, MBA director, Wits Business School: “From my perspective, for students to be comfortable online, you need to constantly reassure them. Keeping them engaged is also an issue. What has been working, for me is to have students working in teams; give them 30 minutes to present and analyse a case study together. This has helped immensely in terms of getting them engaged over time. Overall, for me, we still have a long way to go. We have settled into offering classes through online platforms, but in terms of actually perfecting what we are doing, we really have to invest a little bit more, not only financially but we also need to invest time in understanding what needs to be done to make this work.”
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Ambition | BE IN BRILLIANT COMPANY
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