Arbaugh Online and Blended Business Education for the 21st Century

Current Research and Future Directions
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-1-78063-161-5
Verlag: Elsevier Science & Techn.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 218 Seiten

Reihe: Chandos Learning and Teaching Series

Examines the state of research of online and blended learning in business disciplines with the intent of identifying opportunities for meaningful future research and enhancing the practice of online teaching in business schools. The book evaluates research from business disciplines such as accounting, economics, finance, information systems (IS), management, marketing, and operations/supply chain management. The author reports on topics attracting interest from scholars in the respective disciplines, the methods commonly used to examine those topics, and the most noteworthy conclusions to date from that research. - Written by a leading scholar on online learning in the business disciplines - The author is the current editor of the leading Learning and Education journal - Focused on online and blended learning in business schools

J. B. (Ben) Arbaugh is a Professor of Strategy and Project Management at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. He is the current Editor of Academy of Management Learning & Education and a Past Chair of the Academy of Management's Management Education and Development Division. Ben's research in online learning and graduate management education has earned best article awards from the Journal of Management Education and the Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, research grants from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the Graduate Management Admissions Council's (GMAC) Management Education Research Institute (MERI), and MERI's 2009 Faculty Fellowship. Ben sits on several journal editorial boards, including The Internet and Higher Education, Management Learning, the Journal of Management Education, Organization Management Journal, and the Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Arbaugh, J B

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2 Multi-disciplinary and program-level research in online business education
Introduction
For online business education to be effective, it seems appropriate first to consider effectiveness from a programmatic or curricular perspective rather than from the perspective of individual disciplines. Business programs seek to deliver an integrated curriculum, albeit with slight variations across institutions, usually depending upon areas of faculty or institutional competency or specialized regional or student needs, particularly at the graduate level (Julian and Ofori-Dankwa, 2006; Navarro, 2008; Dierdorff, 2009). It therefore behooves business schools to ensure to the greatest extent possible that their delivery of online programs is of consistent quality across the curriculum. It does not benefit a business school if courses in only one or two disciplines of its online offerings are well designed and delivered. As such, research that conceptualizes and examines online business education in ways that consider multiple disciplines in the same study is particularly welcome. It is for these reasons that we address research that looks across the curriculum and/or examines the learners’ overall experiences with online learning early on in this book. Although subsequent chapters may suggest that research in online business education tends to be anchored within the respective disciplines, cross-disciplinary and program-level studies are increasingly common in this literature, and are the focus of this chapter. Research from this ‘umbrella’ perspective includes conceptual frameworks, narrative discussions of experiences of learners and/or instructors, and empirically-derived articles. The conceptual articles tend to focus on either general frameworks of educational effectiveness or build models or principles of best practices in online business education. As they often have relatively large research samples, multi and cross-disciplinary studies lend themselves to comparatively robust methodological approaches. Research in this area includes broad-based institutional surveys, single-institution studies explicitly designed using courses from several disciplines, and programlevel studies that survey students about their collective experiences with online learning within a degree program rather than with a particular course or courses. This chapter reports the key findings from these studies and the approaches used to report them. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how these findings should influence our perspectives on the discipline-specific research we will see in subsequent chapters. Conceptual models and best practices
Although studies of online business education in the mid to late 1990s consisted largely of narrative accounts of instructors’ initial experiences with online learning (and that they lived to tell about them), conceptual models of technology-mediated learning during this period have continued to influence thinking on online business education to this day. With 562 citations as of January 2010 according to Google Scholar, perhaps the most influential of these models was developed by Dorothy Leidner and Sirkka Jarvenpaa (1995). Their model was the first to integrate theories of learning with information technology platforms and present arguments for which platforms best complemented particular learning theories in the context of management education. The learning theories they used included objectivist, constructivist, cooperative, cognitive information processing and sociocultural models. They presented objectivism as an approach whose primary goal was to facilitate the transfer of knowledge of an objective reality from instructor to learners. In this theory, instructors control the content and the pace at which that content is delivered, and mechanisms or technologies which enhance the knowledge transfer process are seen as positive. Conversely, constructivism contends that rather than being transferred from an instructor-expert to novice-learners, knowledge is constructed by the individual learner through interacting with objects and using their own questioning, investigation and invention approaches. In constructivist learning environments, project-based learning is often used to immerse learners in a real-world context. Leidner and Jarvenpaa (1995) have, however, argued that constructivist approaches have often been used inappropriately, such as to acquire preordained factual or procedural knowledge rather than in situations where new meanings and/or higher order learning is required (Garrison et al., 2000). In this model, cooperative and cognitive information processing are positioned as extensions of the constructivist approach. Leidner and Jarvenpaa differentiated cooperative models of learning from constructivist approaches based upon the need for fellow participants in the learning process. While constructivist approaches have learners interacting with objects, learners in cooperative environments acquire knowledge primarily through interacting with other learners. These learners bring some prior knowledge to the learning experience and participation with other learners in favorable conditions, such as relatively small discussion groups, allowing them to co-create new knowledge. In this theory of learning, the instructor must be a skilled facilitator of information and knowledge sharing and be able both to provide feedback and encourage feedback from other learners. The cognitive information processing model differs from constructivism in its focus on using instructional inputs to develop and refine mental models in the learner’s longterm memory rather than on temporarily created knowledge. This model contends that learners will differ in preferred learning style; therefore, instruction must be individualized. As with the cooperative model, the learner’s prior knowledge significantly influences their ability to process information. Finally, given limited information processing capacity, learners will need tools such as outlines and learning goals and/or objectives to help keep them on task. Leidner and Jarvenpaa then proposed four visions of information technologies, their potential impacts on learning, and the primary technological tools for implementing each of the visions. The vision to automate is the perspective of using information technologies to replace human labor to perform structured, routine, operational tasks reliably and efficiently. As teaching and learning are semi-structured activities, in an educational context the primary automating activities would be the delivery of information. The primary devices for such a vision would be instructor consoles, student standalone computers, computer-assisted learning, and distance learning via compressed video. The vision to automate up is the idea that information technology can be used to give instructors feedback on student understanding in a timely manner so that the instructor may readily clarify student misconceptions of the course material. Tools proposed to support this vision included key response pads and student instructor e-mails outside of class. The vision to informate down pertains to providing learners with information and communication capabilities. Information-based technologies included networked computers with shared databases, the world wide web, simulations and virtual reality. Examples of communication-based technologies included synchronous communication software, such as Lotus Notes, and groupware packages. The vision to transform entails using information technology to redefine or eliminate the physical boundaries of the classroom, further facilitate teamwork, allow learning to be a continuous, time-independent process, and enable multi-level, multi-speed knowledge creation. The tools for this vision included e-mail, electronic message boards, and groupware-supported classrooms with remote access capability. The integration of learning theories and information technologies serves as a foundation for what we now know as online and blended learning in business education. Leidner and Jarvenpaa saw technology as tool for automation or to informate up as closely aligned with objectivist learning theory because the purpose of these activities is to disseminate information, and the instructor holds control over the pacing and content of the instruction. They argued that technologies that informate down are aligned with constructivist learning theory because they move control of the learning process to the students whereby they use explicit information to become knowledge creators, and the instructor shifts from dictating to mediating the learning process. Technologies to transform are most directly linked to online teaching and learning because they eliminate time and location boundaries of traditional classrooms and learners co-create new knowledge based upon the sharing and integration of their previously individually-held tacit knowledge. This framework is most consistent with collaborative and cognitive information processing theories of learning, and its assumptions of substantive learner-held tacit knowledge suggests that it is particularly appropriate for graduate-level business education. Because of the changes in roles, requirements and workloads associated with this vision, the authors predicted that this model could encounter resistance from both learners and instructors. Subsequent research has revealed that this resistance has occurred in at least some quarters, which we will discuss in further detail shortly. Although at least some of these technologies now seem quite...