Exponential Growth of Business Schools - A Paradigm in Emergence: An Imperative Need to Transform Management Education and Development
Rapid technological advancement coupled with ever increasing interconnectedness has been opening the global opportunities for everyone, amidst rising global population and declining resources. It is an imperative need of management professionals to deal with newer and dynamic challenges in the public or private systems. Often newer challenges require varied solutions that can come from critical thinking younger generation management graduates and quality of tomorrow’s professionals is the result of today’s efforts in educational systems. Present scenario of management education presents a bleak future as most of our educational policies and systems are designed to produce mediocre professionals. Therefore, it is need of the hour to reengineer and transform most of the management programmes the way they are offered. The paper discusses the present scenario of management education, prerequisites for quality of management education, sustenance of quality, pedagogical tools and future outlook.
Management Education for Practicing Managers: Combining Academic Rigor With Personal Change and Organizational Action
For several decades, management educators have discussed the difficulty of accommodating the competing values of academic rigor and organizational relevance. Only a few articles, however, consider approaches for integrating theory and practice in educational programs for working managers. Building on 15 years of experience in executive education, this article presents an approach grounded in experiential and action learning, which combines personal learning and organizational action without compromising academic standards. The following educational practices are discussed and evaluated: reflection reports, personal learning contracts, roundtable examinations, live cases, action-oriented thesis work, and organizational knowledge theaters. Taken together, the approach constitutes a powerful program design to address multiple learning loci and combinations of reflection and action, albeit one with considerable challenges and difficulties, as the authors discuss.
Science fairs as learning tool for teaching excellence
Science fairs are usually considered to be a pedagogical and cultural activity that involves the students actively. Gifted students need challenges to further develop their skills while maintaining the motivation level. Science fairs may provide the informal environment that will request and allow these students of excellence to challenge themselves by developing a scientific research project. Despite being well known in different countries, in Portugal first steps are being made on the use and implementation of science fairs as effective pedagogical tool. In this work, we will present a 4 years study that was developed on a Portuguese school with the main goal of evaluating the advantages of this informal way of teaching. The study includes an analysis of the evolution of the students’ knowledge that have participated, or visited, the different science fairs. Some advices for the implementation of these projects will be given. The motivation of the students was monitored as well as the knowledge and skills effectively improved by this activity.