Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/63446
TECHFOCUS For more than two decades, Jason Frand has been monitoring the use of computers on business school campuses. With a doctorate in mathematics and more than 20 years' experience teaching statistics in the MBA program at the Anderson School at the University of California in Los Angeles, Frand has conducted 16 surveys on the use of computers in business schools. In addition to serving as Anderson's assistant dean and director of computing services, he conducts research, writes articles, and gives presentations on the effects of technology on the way people live and learn. The news on the IT front is not all positive, Frand says. With so much information at their fingertips online, and so many demands on their attention via e-mail, pagers, and cell phones, people have developed a sense of immediacy that often overrides their sense of what's important in their lives. Frand has long contemplated the role technology will play in the ways business schools present themselves to the student consumer. In his theory of the "Information Age mindset," he points out that the effects of tech- nology, present and future, could have unforeseen consequences if it is not managed with care. What prompted you to start surveying deans about technology? In 1980, my dean suggested I find out what some other busi- ness schools were doing with technology. Two weeks later, I got a call from someone at Washington University in St. Louis, saying, "We're surveying a dozen schools to see what's going on." Then, I got a call from someone at Berkeley, say- ing, "We're surveying a dozen schools." So I said, "Why don't you give me your lists?" I ended up with a list of about 30 schools, and we published a little report in 1981 or 1982. In 1984, I got a call from some people at IBM, who explained that the company would be doing some activity with business schools and would like a copy of our survey. When I told them it was four years old, they asked me to give them a proposal to update it. So I did the "first annual" sur- vey in 1984. After that, someone whose school was not included approached IBM and asked why we didn't do a sur- vey of all the schools. So our next survey included all the AACSB-accredited schools, about 250 at the time. In 1993, for our tenth survey, I expanded it to all member schools, using a worldwide list. Since then, you've expanded the survey to include hundreds of schools worldwide. What have you found most interesting about the evolution of com- puters in business schools? In the early years of the surveys, we were tracking the num- ber of faculty members per computer. At that time, the most well-endowed schools might have two faculty members per computer, whereas the less well-endowed schools would have ten faculty members sharing a computer. When we looked at the graphs over time, the more well-endowed schools went to one faculty member per computer more quickly. However, even more important was that the schools that got them earlier and the schools that got them later did not tend to do different things. The well-endowed schools were all doing e-mail, spreadsheets, simulations, word processing. It's not that some schools got a five-year head start, and so, were doing something phenomenally different from schools that got computers five years later. The surveys have not shown any educational break- through that enables schools to differentiate themselves based on the use of technology. Rather, there has been a sea change in which everybody has benefited from the introduc- tion of technology. For example, when I first taught statistics in 1969, it was unheard of to give students a large amount of data to work with. In fact, there was a debate about whether or not to allow students to use calculators because one side felt it dis- criminated against those who could not afford them. A sim- ple four-function calculator, which could add, subtract, mul- tiply, and divide, cost $75. So you gave students unrealistical- ly simple problems with four or five numbers to practice cal- culating statistics. If you gave them dozens of numbers, you had to send them to a lab that had a calculator. Today, everybody can use Excel and do basic descriptive statistics with huge realistic data sets. So all students— whether they're attending the richest or the poorest school— BizEd JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 31