Clive Holtham and Nigel Courtney, Cass Business School, City of London

In innovative curriculum design in the business school world, what we might be seeking to achieve are two factors in particular:

1. Greater variety in the types of learning experience open to students, over all time periods from a year to an hour
2. A greater percentage of students’ time to be spent in high-engagement learning.

A high tech, high touch framework

The framework in Figure 1 has evolved since it was produced as part of the business case for the new Cass Business School building in July 1998 (Holtham, 1998), which referred to important influences:

“There are two contemporary examples that have influenced our thinking on the above.  The first is the Hoechst-Celanese Innovation lab in Charlotte North Carolina.  We were fortunate to have visited this centre at the invitation of Tom Woczyck (1994) shortly before it closed as a result of a merger.  The high tech-high-touch ambience of this centre influenced us greatly.”

By April 2000 the first version of Figure 1 had been produced, with the Y axis being “Learning”. Naming this Y axis continued to be problematic until December 2003 (Holtham and Courtney, 2003), when the term “engagement intensity” was coined.

Figure 1: The Cass High-Tech/High-Touch Framework (Holtham & Courtney, 2003)

There is great significance in dropping the term “Learning” from the Y axis, as we are reducing the claim of a direct link between the learning space (physical or virtual) and learning. Instead we are claiming that the level of engagement has an impact on the level or type of learning achieved. The physical or virtual space is creating a context for learning, just as the teacher in their curriculum design and lesson planning also creates a context for learning. Successful spaces and successful teachers can increase the chances of successful learning taking place.

Although in our original 1999/2000 thinking we believed that postgraduate students engaged in professional development primarily needed high levels of engagement, in reality the learning experience is a patchwork quilt, which may need components from across the whole spectrum. Even transmissive learning may well at times be appropriate for proficient performers – the crucial thing is to make that learning as efficient (and probably quick) as possible.

Diversity to the rescue

The case for diversity in learning methods is rarely made as it is much more difficult for it to be branded and sold. There is also only a fine dividing line between carefully-crafted and planned diversity in learning methods, and a decentralised rag-bag of un-coordinated approaches. But just as in research there is increasing respect in the social sciences for a diversity of methodologies, so too we would argue in management education we should not just respect, but also seek out, diversity of methods.

One of the most compelling reasons for this is that, despite the many attempts to pigeon-hole individuals by learning styles, most of us have a diversity of learning style preference, particularly taking into account the nature of what is being learnt. Also, where learners are involved in a prolonged episode of learning (which could be a one-year course or just as equally a three hour class), with the sort of declining attention spans now prevalent at all ages, there is a clear case for diversity of methods.

Diversity also allows for the individual characteristics of the teacher to be taken into account. This does not mean that individual teachers can expect unfettered freedom to teach in only one idiosyncratic style, but rather that there should be scope for teachers to show some preference for methods that they are themselves more expert in leading.

Diversity also helps innovation. A university which has wholly committed to Problem Based Learning or Case Studies can and does find it very hard even to make small innovations which challenge their dominant learning method.

However diverse our learning methods, there is no reason why an individual teacher or an individual business school cannot set out explicitly to raise the level of engagement of the student within those learning methods. High engagement can apply at multiple layers:

• For an episode of a few minutes within a class
• A whole course
• A whole institution

Individual teachers and business schools with aspirations to world-class status will increasingly find a particular need to move towards high-engagement at every level.

For a fuller discussion of this topic, see the QuBE research report High-engagement learning for business education.

References

Hake, R.R. (1998) “Interactive-engagement vs traditional methods: A six-thousand-student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics courses,” Am. J. Phys. 66, 64

Holtham, Clive and Courtney, Nigel (2003) “Executive Learning: the evolution of effective e-learning architectures” European Commission E-challenges Conference, Bologna, 22-24 Oct 2003

Rice, Eugenie (2004) “Rethinking Scholarship and Engagement: The Struggle for New Meanings” Research and teaching International Colloquium, Winchester, Higher Education Academy