During a one-week welcoming event here for the general management programme at business school Essec, new students are introduced to the school, the curriculum and the staff. At the end, they are handed what educators there see as one of their most important learning tools: An iPad.
While specialised education tools have long played an important role in the classroom, some of the most commonly used gadgets and websites have become teaching tools of choice at business schools like Essec and elsewhere.
Facebook is increasingly used to foster a sense of community for business school classes that meet just a few times a semester; Twitter is used as a way for students to be heard in big halls, letting them ask questions during lectures without having to raise their hand or voice; and videoconferencing software is used at many business schools as a tool for communication between far-flung networks of professors and experts.
Experts at Essec and elsewhere say out-of-the-box consumer applications and gadgets are extremely valuable in the hands of business students.
“They are used to tie the group together,” said Beate Baldwin, programme director at Essec, whose programme integrates some of the most widely used gadgets and sites as learning and communication tools. Tablet computers in particular are often used to display video and play audio files, and to foster communication, whether through instant messaging or through videoconferencing.
Besides increasingly relying on tablets — while their general management program students use the iPad, the global MBA students use a Galaxy Tabs — Essec also employs popular internet services to help teach.
The school runs an internal communication system with Google services at its heart. All e-mail is exchanged with a customised version of Google’s Gmail, instant communication is handled by Google’s new social networking service, Google+, and teaching materials like case studies and book chapters are loaded onto Google docs. “We made the analysis that corporate technology is less efficient than public technology,” said Jean-Pierre Choulet, Essec’s chief information officer.
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The collaboration with Google started in 2009, school officials said. It gives students at the business school a version of all the services that anyone with a computer and an internet connection has access to, free and behind a firewall.
Other European business schools are using technology favoured by millions of young people around the world to teach their cadre of business elite.
The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, for example, uses Twitter as a back channel for large lower-level business courses.
Students in lectures that hold several hundred of their colleagues ask their questions by using specific hashtags to filter posts relevant to the lecture. Professors standing just metres away check their screen while lecturing to be able to answer questions they deem relevant.
Konrad Osterwalder, who is in charge of teaching and technological development at the university, said the process makes students feel less embarrassed about asking perhaps obvious questions, while allowing professors to see how many students have the same question before launching into a perhaps tangential discussion.
Many European business faculties have learned to use Facebook to communicate with their own students and the outside. Alexander Mädche, who teaches information systems at the University of Mannheim Business School, uses a Facebook page to communicate with his students. He leaves it open so that potential recruits can look in and former students can stay informed.
In setting up such new communication networks, Mädche said, it was important to be aware “which social networking system works for what target group.”
So, for more formalised alumni groupings, the University of Mannheim, just like Essec, uses LinkedIn, a networking service used widely by professionals.
Essec’s LinkedIn page is “hermetically sealed,” said Baldwin, ensuring Essec alumni — often in executive positions at global companies — only interact with the school’s alumni and students.
Not all schools are this tech-savvy, but the trend is moving toward bringing popular technology into the classroom.
At HEC in Paris, another major European business school, iPads are being just now being integrated into the executive MBA programme.
“The iPad is not seen as the latest fashion gadget, but was chosen because it can prove be extremely useful in the classroom,” Delphine Wharmby, HEC’s communication director, said. Like other leading business schools, HEC is interested in the popular device as a teaching tool.
Baldwin of Essec said many of her students — mostly in their late 30s and 40s — were already familiar with using tablets, and already have accounts on sites like Facebook and Twitter — even if they are not used to using these in the classroom or on the job.
“They use it,” she said of popular technology, “but not professionally.”
Business schools are also profiting by using popular technology to disseminate information outside the traditional classroom. Using Apple’s iTunes store, both Essec and HEC are selling some of their more popular content, like teaching videos and audio of lectures.
“Because the new content includes video, we are close to immersive learning,” Choulet said. He explained Essec’s own professors became more interested in producing new content for a wider audience once it became possible to make it more interactive.
“It’s a catalyst to reinvest in content design,” he said. HEC is the first French school to have started an iTunes U page, Apple’s virtual university system, according to Wharmby. The school’s presence on the Apple site is drawing a largely American clientele, enlarging its classroom past its traditional core.
Despite the acceptance by business schools of popular gadgets and well-known Internet services, some schools are still relying on much more specialised electronic tools.
The University of Mannheim’s business school, for example has created a voting program to allow professors to assess and answer questions by their importance among students. Using a proprietary Web-application called AskEris, questions submitted by students are voted on by their peers, allowing professors to tailor lectures.
Elsewhere, schools are using specialised programmes to reshape their teaching. Flat World Knowledge, a textbook company, allows professors to completely re-edit online textbooks. The textbook, changed to more closely match a particular class outline, can be either viewed online or printed out and used as a traditional textbook.
Genevieve Bassellier, who teaches business at McGill University in Canada, uses one of these open-source textbooks in an undergraduate business course on information technology.
“They see a huge increase in quality,” she said, referring to her students’ use of her customised electronic textbook. “It gives me more flexibility.”
One of the things she has been able to add: How to communicate via Twitter.
©2011 The New York
Times News Service