Before I Forget…

Teach India is a nation-building initiative (or social initiative) from the Times of India that brings together children in need of education and people who can contribute a little time towards teaching them.  It is based on one simple principle:  If you have the desire to teach, we will put you in touch with underprivileged children who are willing to learn. With over sixty of India’s committed NGOs, corporates, schools and social organizations already supporting our cause, we now look for selfless individuals to come forward and help change the future of a child forever, by giving just a few hours a week to Teach India.

(click to go to Teach India website)

Sister articles here, here and here.

A professor at a well-known business school was recently grading papers for a required ethics course.  In two of the papers he saw obvious signs of plagiarism.  Students were not required to put their names on their papers, just a number identifiable by the administration.  Before escalating the problem, the professor e-mailed his entire class saying that the guilty parties could avoid sanction by coming forward now.  He received eight e-mails, in addition to the two he had already spotted, admitting to cheating.  Such stories bolster the academic research that suggests business students, both at graduate and undergraduate level, are more inclined to cheat than students in other disciplines.  Critics of business and business education leap on such findings to say that this explains Enron, dodgy hedge funds and crooked sub-prime mortgage lenders.  They say the whole system is built on fraud.  This impression was reinforced further in March when the dean of Durham University’s business school in the UK, Tony Antoniou, was fired for having plagiarised academic work 20 years earlier.  However, in their enthusiasm to eviscerate, the critics may be overlooking some vital differences between a business education and one in, for example, philosophy or electrical engineering.  In spite of their long history – Harvard Business School celebrates its centenary this year – business schools still strain for academic respectability, especially in the minds of their students.  For many, the purpose of attending business school is not to receive an academic education, but to get a job…..“The academic values of integrity and honesty in your work can seem to be less relevant than the instrumental goal of getting a good job,” says Craig Smith, a professor of business ethics and corporate responsibility at Insead, France.  Dispiriting research, he says, indicates that MBA students actually become less ethical over the course of their education.  “The focus on maximising shareholder value causes some students to minimise other important codes of behaviour,” he says.  He adds that the number of graduates of prominent business schools being caught in corrupt practices has forced a “period of useful introspection” at the schools.

The accessibility of information online has affected the definition of plagiarism.  Don McCabe, a professor at Rutgers Business School in the US, has conducted extensive research into plagiarism among business school students.  He says that by far the most commonplace form these days is cutting and pasting from the internet.  This generally involves using a few sentences from multiple sources, either verbatim or paraphrased.  “Many students are very equivocal as to whether this is actually cheating or not,” says Prof McCabe.  “Especially if they paraphrase from a source.” 40% of students in Prof McCabe’s research admitted to cutting and pasting, although he assumes the figure is probably higher.  He adds that students today, both in business schools and beyond, feel much freer than their forebears to define what constitutes cheating for themselves, regardless of their teacher’s instructions.  One example is when a teacher requires individual work, many students see no problem in collaborating with each other.  “They argue that they can produce much better work and that they learn more when working together.  Business students seem to be more ready to justify such behaviour by noting the emphasis corporations are putting on hiring people who can work together in teams.  They argue that their collaboration, even when not permitted, is simply gaining practice at a skill they need to acquire to get a good job and advance,” he says.  “And faculty who do not encourage or allow such collaborative work are simply out of touch.”  Prof McCabe says that from the faculty’s perspective, aside from purely ethical issues, it is hard to give academic credit to students who copy other people’s work.  Whether the students cheat to inflate their grade or simply as a “time-management” solution, they become difficult for professors to grade.  Different schools adopt different strategies to deal with plagiarism. Some delegate policing to faculty, while others put it in the hands of students and a strict honour code.  The latter is generally more effective. 

At Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business in the US, students are taught the honour code from the first day they arrive on campus, when they must also participate in some form of community service.  “It’s a way of telling them that they are not here just to learn about the bottom line, but how to become responsible citizens of society,” says Aine Donovan, executive director of Dartmouth’s Ethics Institute.  Tuck’s pedagogical approach also minimises the opportunities to cheat, with lots of teamwork and few written papers.  Ethics is not a required course at the school, but it is an oversubscribed elective.  “It allows students the chance to think about things which have been bothering them in the rest of their course,” Ms Donovan says.  Most ethics teaching at business schools tends to focus on cases where poor ethical judgments have been made, rather than issues of basic honesty.  These cases, such as Enron and Exxon-Valdez, look at the situations in which individuals and companies made appalling decisions.  They examine the twilight zone in which business decisions, subsequently seen as “ethical”, were made and the stresses on the people who made them.  This tends to provide students with a sliding scale of right and wrong rather than a set of absolutes.  Addressing the more hum-drum issue of plagiarism, Ms Donovan says, can make ethics more personal.  Students tend to be much harsher on each other than faculty. They know stepping outside the lines might yield enormous personal rewards, but comes with equal risk and can be lethal for a community.  Business school students are more likely to self-report cheating, she believes, because they are “more forthright, willing to say ‘sure I shave corners to get ahead’, but then have a reason for it.  A philosophy or comparative literature student will never admit to cheating.”  Ms Donovan used to teach at the US Naval Academy, where cheating on an engineering test might mean being unprepared when a problem arose on a battle ship.  The consequences of plagiarism were dire.  While cheating on a business school paper might not be quite so grave, “these graduates from top business schools are expected to come in to businesses and dazzle.  If they’ve short-changed themselves, they will be found out very quickly”, she adds.

Reference : http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a8696428-2364-11dd-b214-000077b07658.html

…Concerned about the looming shortage of management professors at business schools in the US, the AACSB, the accreditation group, has developed an innovative programme that provides academics in various disciplines with the skills necessary to teach business education.  The “bridge programme”, to launch at five business school campuses in the coming months, is not as newfangled as it sounds, says Mr Fernandes.  “The programmes target professors who already have their PhDs in related social science fields,” he says.  “Remember: there was no business PhDs until the 1950s.  The business professors of old wandered in from other disciplines.”  The production of business PhDs has declined while enrolments in undergraduate and masters level business programmes have increased.  A recent survey by the Graduate Management Admissions Council, which runs the GMAT entry test for business school, found that PhD programmes were the only business administration programmes that did not report many applications from prospective students this year.  And business schools - like other institutions - will be hard-hit as the baby boomer generation retires.  The shortage presents a big problem for business schools, particularly those concerned about maintaining accreditation, says Mr Fernandes.  The AACSB requires member schools to have at least 50% of their classes taught by academically qualified faculty, with 40% allowed for “professionally qualified”, non-PhD teachers and 10% of faculty that may not qualify as either.  “The practitioners do a great job in the classroom, teaching and bringing real world experience to students,” he says.  “However, it’s the academic - the person whose life is management education - that develops curriculum changes and does the basic research that advances the discipline.”…..Within the next five years, the AACSB hopes to have 200 graduates from the bridge programme. “I believe this will be a long-term staple for producing PhDs,” says Mr Fernandes.  He says the key to the programme’s success is that it gives prospective students both intellectual and financial incentives.  The bridge programme enables students “to apply their base discipline”: ”They can do the applied state rather than the theoretical state.”  Second, business school professors make a lot more money than faculty in other fields.  “A math professor makes $70,000 a year, while an accounting professor makes $115,000 and will make much more than that over the course of his lifetime.  There’s a big economic incentive.  Some liberal arts disciplines are way overproducing PhD candidates.  They can’t possibly be absorbed by academia,” he says.  “A business degree has a lot of portability.”

Looming threat of faculty shortage as PhD entrants fall : Business schools around the globe are facing a faculty shortage within the next decade, according to new statistics…..Meanwhile, schools expect 11.4% of their doctoral faculty to retire in the next five years, up from 10.8% in 2002-03.  “The shortages have been brewing for [several] years and it’s gotten very competitive,” says Judy Olian, dean of the UCLA Anderson School of Management in the US, who has researched this area.  “We have a very large number of pending retirements of baby-boomer faculty members, exploding student enrolments, and a huge increase in the number of business schools around the world.”  There are other reasons for the worldwide shortage.  For one, budget cuts at research universities have had a negative impact on the size of doctoral business programmes.  “There are no traditional funding sources for management PhDs like there are in big science,” she says.  Second, business schools have not effectively marketed management PhDs as a credential that leads to a lucrative career.  “There is a terminal degree in business in the form of the MBA which doesn’t necessarily encourage students to go on and get their PhD,” she says.  “And there is a misconception that if you sign on for a business PhD you’ll be resigned to a life of poverty, when in fact it’s an attractive and viable profession.”  Professor Olian says the shortage is “a very significant issue”.  “I think we need to recognise [the value of investing in business doctoral programmes] in the same way we recognise the need to invest in science and technology as a matter of American competitiveness,” she says.  “It’s critical to invest . . I view it as a national priority.”

Reference : http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/46e6945e-1a3c-11dd-ba02-0000779fd2ac.html

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1. New methods of learning : At the end of 2006 Judge Business School at Cambridge University became the first business school to use LiveEcon, new interactive electronic textbooks for economics.  After extensive trials, it has started using the books, published by Scotland-based Interactyx, with this year’s MBA intake…..Interactive e-learning tools such as LiveEcon can be a cost-effective substitute for some small-group teaching, says Dr Runde.  They are also ideal for delivery via online course management systems, and can free up time for faculty to give students face-to-face attention and personal feedback.
2. New methods of delivery: Two recent developments illustrate how mobile devices can be used to deliver content to course participants when they are on the move, between meetings, or even waiting at a bus-stop.  Irish-based Skill-Pill M-Learning has developed Skill-Pills, concise video briefings that can be delivered to mobile phones, Blackberrys, video iPods or smart phones.  The leadership content created by Nigel Nicholson, professor of organisational behaviour at London Business School, has been turned into a series of “pills” that support his executive education teaching.  One advantage of this method of delivery, compared with the fixed internet, is that the content can be “with” the user when he or she needs it and can be used to refresh their knowledge just before using it…..Elsewhere, in a pilot programme that began last September, Tecnológico de Monterrey, the Mexican business school, is delivering content to students’ 3G mobile phones – typically, a 10-15 minute presentation by faculty or a guest speaker.  Patricio López Del Puerto, dean of the school’s virtual university, says it is working to incorporate this concept at least partially across its courses.  “On average in the city of Monterrey, people have 23 hours a week of lost time, queuing or waiting,” he says.  “They cannot get their laptops out, but they can use their mobile phones.”
3. New forms of communication:…..Manchester Business School Worldwide is typical in making heavy use of asynchronous communication such as discussion boards for socialising and for building communities within the course.  These are supplemented by synchronous communication – in some courses, for example, students have weekly tutorials using a web-based conferencing system and some academics offer drop-in synchronous chat sessions.  Tecnológico de Monterrey, meanwhile, has addressed the confusion that can be caused if everyone talks at once in synchronous sessions by developing its Radio Chat system.  The faculty member gives an online audio talk, akin to an internet radio station, and students send their questions via a chat session initiated by the school.
4. Improved access to content: Adobe, whose content creation and online delivery products are widely used by business schools, has developed an application called Air (Adobe Integrated Runtime) that could be used to create a branded “school” on the student’s desktop.  Students can click on a desktop icon to gain access to all their course materials when on or offline.  They can also set notifications so they do not have to go to the browser, log in and check for new materials.  “Air will give business schools a very good opportunity both to look at personalised learning and for distributing learning experiences in a different way from what has been available in the past,” says Ellen Wagner, Adobe’s director of e-learning.
5. Getting closer to the face-to-face experience: The concept of telepresence – using technology to present a distant person in all but lifelike guise – is attracting interest from business schools because it comes as close as is possible to the immediacy of a face-to-face meeting.  In the US, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business has developed a Global Conference and Teaching System for its Cross Continent MBA programme.  The system, based on technology from Polycom, is an immersive telepresence videoconferencing solution that provides a “same room” meeting experience.  Remote participants are lifelike in size and in audio and visual clarity.  Cisco’s product in this field, TelePresence, was launched in late 2006 and “adds some new dimensions to the mix”, according to Kevin Johnson, who heads the education sector in Europe for the US company’s Internet Business Solutions Group…..These technologies are not cheap – a three-screen TelePresence system for large group meetings costs $300,000.  But, according to Dr López at Tecnológico de Monterrey, “big conference rooms with real-size people at the other end” could be an important development for business schools over the next few years.  He says: “This type of system is coming because we want to establish contact with people without any kind of interference from the technology.”

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Reference : http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/4bdbaa60-f1a3-11dc-9b45-0000779fd2ac.html