from the FT today - does this apply to other subjects?

It's all the fault of the timetable and textbook

By Gerard Hanlon

Published: November 2 2009 02:00 | Last updated: November 2 2009 02:00

Both the textbook and the academic timetable, lie at the root of a growing crisis in management education, especially at undergraduate level; one that needs addressing if we are to avert any future economic meltdown and retain any semblance of creative learning in universities and business schools.

How can two things so innocuous and ubiquitous to degree studies be blamed for educational and institutional failings?

The semester divides the year into two teaching periods of 12 weeks each, followed by revision and examination. It was introduced at the zenith of the UK's embrace of globalisation and heralded a world where the majority of students would enrol at a university in the UK and study overseas at universities in Rome, New York or Hong Kong.

Such a world never emerged; undergraduate students increasingly live at home, and they work and are encumbered with debt - globetrotting occurs later in life, if at all. Instead we are left with the negative impact of the semester. This negative is essentially a world of 12 short, inflexible lecturing weeks per module.

On its own this might be workable, but when combined with the restrictions created by the over-reliance on textbooks, we enter a world of de-skilling, one where we subtract rather than add value.

After a week-long introduction and a further week-long conclusion we are left with 10 lectures "umbilically" attached to an eight or 10-chapter text book. The textbook comes with ready-made questions and answers for academics to use - essentially a mass-produced, off-the-shelf solution to large teaching classes - sometimes of 200 students or more.

Within this set up a switched-on student realises he or she must read five chapters in order to answer four questions of assessment and leave some margin for error. A less motivated student thinks the answer to the complex issues of say materiality in accountancy or value in human capital is in the book, specifically chapter three. Hence this is all they need to read.

This teaching encourages instrumentality and fear. Instrumentality, because in the increasingly work- and debt-filled world of a student, time is a rare commodity not to be used to learn beyond the exam and textbook.

Fear, because students are unable to cope with not having one correct answer. Yet management and life are about dealing with complexity and alternatives. If I am right then business schools are spectacularly not preparing students for either.

This problem will get worse as class sizes increase, fees turn students into customers who are not allowed to fail and publishers tighten their grip on education through the production of internet-based e-learning with dedicated readings, assessment and lecture templates; all of which come solely from the publisher's very particular back catalogue.

There is of course an alternative. Oxford, Cambridge, the Open University, Harvard, MIT and institutions such as the British Library and the research funding bodies, are putting vast libraries on open access and programmes such as 'Moodle' provide free software for web-based teaching.

Business schools, I suggest, should be bold and ambitious, use this array of academic material, reject the textbook and discourage the mass produced, de-skilled student. Instead they should nurture risk-taking, innovation, confidence and an appreciation of complexity in their faculty and their student body.

They can do this by preparing teaching that uses the full range of accumulated knowledge and by providing multiple answers - thereby fostering an appreciation of uncertainty in knowledge. As Einstein said: "Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."

Taking this brave stance will enable business schools to help preserve rather than undermine the university as a site of education and more importantly, to produce students with judgment. After all it is judgment that will see them rise to the growing challenge of work and life.

Prof Gerard Hanlon is head of the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary, University of London, www.ft.com/soapboxforum