Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/139946
technology TOOLS OF THE TRADE B-Schools Make a Match The MBA admissions process can be challenging for students and business schools alike. Schools must find ways to showcase their strengths to attract the best students, and students must scour rankings, printed materials, and web-based information to determine which institution best suits their learning styles and goals. In the process, some students find the perfect match, but others find themselves enrolled in programs that just aren't the right fit. To ease this process, 15 business school deans have formed the Business Education Alliance (BEA), a nonprofit that is designing a webbased interactive tool to offer prospective students an objective source of reliable data on MBA programs and allow them to conduct personalized searches of business school programs. The new platform, called BestMatch, will provide not only verified information about participating business schools, but also tools for self-assessment. "We often assume that prospective MBA students know what they're looking for in a program. That's not always the case," says Larry Pulley, BEA chairman and dean of the College of William & Mary's Mason School of Business in Williamsburg, Virginia. "This tool will help them pinpoint their career interests and the skills they'll need to achieve those goals." In addition, BestMatch will answer crucial questions about a program's total cost, a student's likelihood of acceptance, and job prospects after graduation. BestMatch will offer an equal opportunity to match a wider range of graduates with recruiters, says Anthony Hendrickson, dean of the College of Business at Creighton University in 56 July/August 2013 BizEd Omaha, Nebraska, and a BEA participant. "Many companies limit their searches to five or six schools," he says, which also limits their access to talent. The BEA grew out of a December 2009 discussion among deans about the rankings, explains Pulley. Their conclusion was that rankings don't tell the whole story of what business schools have to offer. "We want to provide a tool that provides a deeper, richer source of information for a broader array of students, companies, and schools," says Pulley. "Ultimately, our goal is to improve the outcome of business education." Privately funded, BEA is working with IvyCorp, a Seattlebased technology company, to build the BestMatch platform. The alliance welcomes new member schools, as well as employers, to contribute to the platform's design and system of data gathering. For information, visit www.beducationalliance.org. Pearson Expands to the Cloud Pearson, a global publishing and education services company, has acquired Learning Catalytics, a cloud-based learning analytics and assessment system developed by Eric Mazur, Brian Lukoff, and Gary King of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts. The Learning Catalytics system allows faculty to ask their students open-ended or critical thinking questions, receive answers and measure student performance in real time, and determine which areas require further explanation. The software then automatically groups students for further discussion based on their needs. The software offers faculty a "graphical dashboard" to show how students are learning, says Paul Corey, president of Pearson Higher Education's science, business, and technology division. With that information, he adds, faculty can "dive more deeply into areas of common misconceptions or make adjustments in real time." This represents one of Pearson's newest tools designed to support online higher education, including OpenClass, a cloud-based learning management system. For more information, visit learningcatalytics.com.