Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/58063
Your Turn Faculty: Embrace the Tech-Supported Classroom I've become a passionate evangelist for technology in the MBA classroom. I am so convinced that video and audio technology offer a win/win situation for business schools that I don't believe there really is a ques- tion about whether schools should exploit such technologies for class use. The real question now is who's going to lead and who's going to play catch-up. Too many business professors have distanced themselves from new classroom tools, either because they're intimidated by the technol- ogy or they're unwilling to take the time to revise their course materials. Faculty aren't simply missing incred- ible opportunities to enhance their in-class sessions—they're also put- ting their schools at a disadvantage. In today's competitive market, the school that deploys the best technol- ogy may be the school that attracts the best students. I know that technology can radi- cally transform an MBA classroom because I've seen how it enabled me to revise both the content and deliv- ery of my microeconomics course. Not only did technology provide a supplemental learning tool for students, it made their study time more efficient and classroom time more valuable for both my students and me. The course revision started about a decade ago as I strove to make the class more relevant, particularly to older and fully employed executive- level students. I found that many of these students remembered their undergraduate economics courses as 62 BizEd MARCH/APRIL 2007 having little connection to management issues, and they were not inter- ested in spending much time on microeconom- ics as grad students. Another difficulty I encountered was finding a microeconomics text- book designed exclu- sively for MBAs. I developed my own textbook, which included a heavy dose of conventional microeconomic theory, and an equally heavy dose of the growing subdiscipline of organizational economics. Together they illustrated how a relatively few economic principles and lines of argument could be used in under- standing management problems and solutions. In effect, I integrated what used to be a second-year course on "managing through incentives" into my core course on microeconom- ics—but I wasn't able to do so fully or with great success until I began to take advantage of rapidly advancing classroom technologies. A half dozen years ago, the Merage School of Business at the University of California in Irvine began streaming and capturing for downloads the review sessions we organized for our fully employed and executive MBA students. At about the same time, I began hold- ing my "office hours" early in the morning at a Starbucks near campus, where I went every morning to get my caffeine fix. It was convenient for my students to see me at this Star- bucks in the morning, as opposed to getting off from work during the day and finding on-campus parking to see me in my office at school. One morning early in the course, three students had set up appoint- by Richard B. McKenzie ments a half hour apart to talk over a line of argument they did not understand. Each stu- dent asked the same question, virtually word for word. After spend- ing an hour and a half talking to the students individually, I realized there was a better way of dealing with such repetitive questions. All I had to do was record a video module on the topic and post it on the Web for streaming and downloading. Indeed, I found that, when not interrupted by students, I could record this particular explanation in less than ten minutes, and then I never had to repeat it! That year, I developed 18 video modules to deal with other repetitive questions from students. The next year, I increased the video modules to 20. Last year, when my textbook was being prepared for publication, I ran the count of video modules to more than 60. Most are 12 minutes or less, although they total more than ten hours. Together these mod- ules cover core topics that all MBA students should have a nodding acquaintance with and more com- plicated issues that students rarely understand when they encounter them for the first time. Frankly, most of the video modules cover top- ics from my lectures that I consider tedious and boring, even though they are essential to a student's under- standing of microeconomic theory. The video modules now have been made downloadable to both laptops and video iPods, in versions both with and without the video. I consider these modules a win for the students for two reasons: