Management education needs a more flexible approach

This is the view of Drikus Kriek, director at the Leadership Development Centre of the University of the Witwatersrand, who recently spoke at the 20th Annual CEEMAN Conference, hosted by the University of Stellenbosch Business School in Cape Town, on the possibility of achieving teaching excellence in management education.

Arthur Lindemanis, chair of the Entrepreneurship Department at Riga International School of Economics and Business Administration in Latvia, gave the example of the Warsaw School of Economics successfully adopting a case study method from North America to illustrate that teachers should be more willing to take risks by personalising their teaching approach, as well as collaborating with others in the academic world. By localising the method and replicating the programme, the school found it to be a successful example of academic collaboration.

Free online courses

Arshad Ahmad, president of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education in Canada, noted that only 30% of management education PhD students stayed in academia, while 70% started careers in their chosen field of study. Due to this, he called for a malleable approach to the teaching curriculum in management education, in that teaching should not be enforced as part of the syllabus.

He also addressed concerns that academic excellence was being compromised by the multitude of free online courses offered by accredited institutions, such as Coursera.org. "Academic institutions such as ours should not be threatened by the free education offered online, as much as the standards we have set ourselves. As long as we raise the bar on the quality of education offered by our international business schools, our academic excellence will not be compromised."