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Carpe Diem - Seize the day. This old adage
has particular application to business
education today in that, as reported in a Sloan-C listserv discussion, there are
discussions from the Department of Education around
the possibility of moving from the traditional
Carnegie units to competency based evaluation.
This discussion was evoked by a policy recommendation from The
International Association for K-12 Online Learning
(iNACOL) and directed to K-12 but it has far
reaching possibilities for business education at both
the bachelors and masters level, allowing us to
close the gap between what business schools
currently teach and what businesses pay employees to
do. In this article, the terms `business school'
and `university' are used interchangeably in that
while the focus of the article is on business, the suggestions here could be used by any
degree-focus in a university. The terms education
and training in this article mean `gaining
knowledge and wisdom about a subject' and
`learning methods and procedures about how to do something' respectfully. In this article, I
use `competency' to mean performance-oriented practice-behavior understanding
(knowledge/wisdom) at a broad level, whereas I use
`objective' to mean a measurable task-oriented or
behavior-application in a specific context.
A Carnegie unit represents the number of hours of seat-time that a student must complete
in order to earn the assigned credits for a course
(http://www.lavc.edu/vccc/documents/carnegieunits.html). For a lecture course of
three credits, a student would be expected to invest
54 hours across 18 weeks. While seat-time is a
useful measure in that it can be measured easily,
seat-time does not relate to competencies. With
the availability of the internet to the general public
in the early 1990s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History-of-the-Internet) and the explosive
growth on online content, the idea that students can
gain information and knowledge only in a class
room sitting on a chair is no longer valid. A
recent search on YouTube.com for `business
lectures' produced a list of 2,550 lectures. In addition,
a search of iTunes Stanford University for
`business lectures' yielded a list of 96 lectures. I am sure
that if I searched every iTunes university site
the number would be exponentially higher. There is no longer a need for students to `sit' in
a classroom. Content is now ubiquitous—so
what should be measure to ensure that students gain
the information, knowledge, and, we hope, wisdom that our current and future businesses want?
I propose in this article that business schools
work with business associations such as the
American Management Association (AMA), American Society for Production and Inventory
Control (APICS), American Society for Quality,
(ASQ), Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM),
American Accounting Association (AAA), American Marketing Association
(AMkA), and the Information Technology Association
(ITA) to create a list of core competencies and a list
of outcomes that demonstrate mastery at each of
the bachelor's and master's degree level. In addition
to the core competencies, elective or
specialization certification can be done in areas of
specific interest to the university/school by working
with specialty associations in global business, entrepreneurship, hospitality, finance,
project management, etc., as needed to create the
unique selling proposition for the educational entity. |
