Many of the winning responses to the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC)’s call for ideas for improving graduate management education focus on changing what gets taught in business school, the council announced this month.
The first phase of GMAC’s Ideas to Innovation (i2i) Challenge invited proposals from around the globe for ways to improve graduate management education. Business school students, university faculty members, corporate teams and others answered the call. Twenty winning ideas were selected from more than 650 entries. As part of the second phase, GMAC has invited graduate business schools and other non-profit education providers to submit proposals by December 16th to implement any of the top 20 ideas.
GMAC’s $10 million Management Education for Tomorrow (MET) Fund supports the initiative. The MET Fund awarded $262,000 to the 20 winning submissions in phase one, and the remainder of the fund will finance the best proposals for implementing any of those plans as part of the second phase.
Six of the 20 winning proposals from phase one focused on improving business school curriculum. “Improving curriculum may be the most direct way to effect positive change in graduate management education,” Allen Brandt, MET Fund director, said in a statement. “The beauty of many of these ideas is they could be implemented quickly, at one or two schools, and yet they could be easily replicated worldwide,” he added.
Winning proposals focused on curriculum changes include the following:
• The introduction of a course on problem-solving models from other disciplines. This idea, submitted by James Falbe, International Service Partners consultant, calls for adding a course on problem-solving models in other academic fields, such as history, psychology or mathematics, to help give management students the tools to address the symptoms and causes of tomorrow’s big problems, whether or not they are rooted in business.
• A cross-university telecommuting project. This proposal, from Aadel Al-Jadda, a University of Rochester Simon Graduate School of Business Administration student, suggests incorporating a cross-university exercise in which second-year MBA students at one university would hire, manage and fire first-year MBA students at a different university through telecommunication, helping students on both ends better understand the limitations and differences telecommuting creates.
• Including a real-world service project in business ethics study. Sisi Zhu, a Rosetta consultant, submitted this plan, in which student teams would have to solve or alleviate a company or community problem as part of their business ethics education.
• Teaching communication for the technological age. This plan, from Lauren Hanat, Lehigh University Master of Science Accounting and Information Analysis Program student, calls for management programs to emphasize communication in the technological age through business writing and editing, courses and competitions in communications and better design of the school environment to facilitate agile communication.
• Having students teach business certificate programs. From Price Paramore, a US Air Force hospital administrator, this proposal calls for business students to teach eight- to 12-week business certificate programs to local entrepreneurs, helping the students better understand the content and the local businesspeople improve their practices.
• Having students teach business to underrepresented urban teens. This idea, from Erich Dierdorff, a DePaul Kellstadt Graduate School of Business assistant professor, proposes that MBA students have a service learning requirement in which they would teach business to underrepresented urban high school students.
For more about these or the other 14 winning ideas, click here.
Read the full article: GMAC i2i Challenge Draws Proposals for Business School Curriculum Improvements