Michel Gutsatz's blog

Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post about elearning, one of the topics that will be addressed during the upcoming Business School 2.0 workshop.

E-learning is expanding worldwide and is deeply changing teaching modes and knowledge management practices. We agree that e-learning may lead to positive changes in facilitating circulation of knowledge and access to education of people with social or financial difficulties. Moreover, we may admit that younger people may find in the ICT a funnier way to learn, closer to their habit of social networking on the web.

However, and as any radical innovation which is both technological and social oriented, e-learning does not always reach the expected objectives. And in a more severe way, we postulate that, when mis-implemented and misused, e-learning may undermine knowledge management and teaching modes. Such “dark side” or negative aspect of e-learning are often neglected. We present the main results from a qualitative and inductive research which has been conducted at Euromed Management two years ago around the general topic: “what is ideal course?” and “what are the very appropriate ICT to learn?”

We found that students were facing difficulties, not only in using the "tools 2.0" (collaborative tools, shared resources, ...) but also in understanding and challenging the different resources available to them (Wikipedia-like web sites, online courses, dedicated databases such as EBSCO...).

Before going further with even more complex tools and procedures, those two basic issues point out that the successful e-campus needs to at least address the following:

Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post about the MIT's OpenCourseWare, an initiative that interests the participants of the upcoming Business School 2.0 workshop.

The OpenCourseWare changes the education world because it makes course materials available on the Web, free of charge, and open to the educators and learners anywhere in the world. The concept was born in 2003 when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology began providing its courses online for free. OpenCourseWare allows self-learners to access high-quality knowledge for free, gives alumni a link to their school, provide educators with teaching materials, and enables prospective students to virtually get into university classrooms. The program is free and offers no reward other than knowledge.

In 2005, MIT and other higher education organizations formed the nonprofit OpenCourseWare Consortium with the objective to provide “free and open digital publication of high quality education materials, organized as a course.” As of mid-2008, more than 200 higher education institutions and organizations had joined up with the Consortium to offer courses ranging from art history to economics. The course content varies and may have a combination of lecture notes, quizzes, exams, video clips and audio lectures. The movement also includes its own YouTube channel, YouTube EDU, which hosts videos from more than 100 colleges and universities, as well as Academic Earth, which lists video lectures. Apple, too, with iTunes U, allows curious minds to download video and audio lectures to their iPods for learning on the go. What used to be expensive and inaccessible becomes convenient and accessible to everyone.

Making course ware from premier institutions available online to all for free is a frank success. The OpenCourseWare Consortium boasts more than 100 million visits since its launch in 2006. The MIT OpenCourseWare alone, which provides 1,900 free courses oline, has recently published data (http://www.tofp.org/blog/?p=420) that show impressive numbers :

• More than 53.7 million individuals have now visited the MIT OpenCourseWare’s site & affiliated sites (1 million in April 2009 alone),
• OpenCourseware servers have now delivered over 3.1 billion files (“hits”) since launch,
• 8.5 million zip files of full course content have been downloaded from the site,
• 2.1 million OpenCourseWare videos have been downloaded from iTunes, with its videos viewed more than 2.5 million times on YouTube.

The competition between universities and technological improvements add up to education for anyone interested in learning. By making up-to-date educational content widely available, OpenCourseWare upgrades the level of standard education and focuses faculty efforts on teaching and learning on their campuses. The school expertise, the expert knowledge, will be crucial components of the future Business School model.

Ammie Eichenbaum, World Med MBA participant
Sources : Diverse Issues in Higher Education, Education-portal.com, The CS Monitor.

Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post introducing in more details the Business Schools 2.0 workshop happening at Lift France.
Authors: Boris Bartikowski, Associate Professor of Marketing at Euromed Management and Nitish Singh, Assistant Professor of International Business, St Louis University

In recent research that we conducted in this field we argued that three interrelated Global Megatrends, namely Globalization, Rise of Networks and Open Innovation, are facilitated by the global expansion of the Web. Looking at these three Global Megatrends can help anticipating some challenges that business schools may face in the future.

Globalization comes along with convergence and integration. Globalization leads in many instances to increased standardization of social and economic interrelationships. Coincidentally, globalization leads to increased cultural flow, cultural multipolarity and growing global workforce. Business schools are at the crossroad of this development. They strive to establish global market presence, and to strengthen their position through international partnerships. One of the challenges they are facing is to create economies of scale through standardization in an environment that requires culturally sensitive dialogues and that values offerings that are adapted to the local needs of diverse stakeholders.

Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post by Euromed Management's Michel Gutsatz about rethinking business schools.

"Here You will See the World through Different Eyes"

The Euromed Management signature was chosen a few years ago because we wanted to tell the business world that our responsibility was to open new perspectives for our students. We stand for diversity & for complexity, we mix globalization & localization AND we train international, responsible leaders & entrepreneurs.
This vision has led us to develop within the School an Innovation School - where students can learn, exchange virtually. It led us to partner with numerous Business Schools abroad and offer our students the possibility to work & learn throughout the world.

It now leads us a step further, to questions like:
- can we imagine a School without walls?
- can we build a School where students spend most of the time in corporations or NGOs or any place where they wish to build their professional career?
- what place for technology in this project?

These questions have led us to Lift, the first brick in the wall of this Business School 2.0, maybe a school without walls?!?

Michel Gutsatz organizes a workshop at Lift France titled "Business Schools 2.0: What Future?". He details here the content of the workshop for which you can sign up here.

The Web has been around for more than 15 years.
The Web 2.0 is a community-based & interactive platform. Social media have spread, based on information sharing and collaborative attitudes.

Expertises are now shared and not owned.
Diversity is now standard.
Complexity is the new norm.
Each and everyone request personalization.
Globalization meets localization.

The teaching community has built impressive websites – including videos, using pictures, building online courses, and developing e-learning methods…
The teaching community is still very much Learning 1.0 based: how can we move to Learning 2.0?

Who owns knowledge? Who builds knowledge? Researchers and/or citizens?
How responsible and ethical should a graduate be?
Is it time to re-train Business Schools?
Have Business Schools contributed to the financial crisis?
Are not Universities & Business Schools labs for social media?

If (business) education needs to be reinvented, then we need people with diverse backgrounds - engineers, designers, business-ers, thinkers & doers - to attend this Workshop!
We at Euromed Management wish to share an open-minded discussion – out of the deconstruction of the present Business School model should rise the future Business School…

Every week we will post a new note on the Lift Conference Blog, introducing ideas, debating a topic… before we all come together on June 18th during the Workshop.

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