Candidate Info: Quality Management

Our Top Priority

As the academic adviser for Executive Programmes, I'm responsible for collaborating closely with Olga Meglinskaya (Curriculum Delivery Manager) to continuously improve the quality of our MBA, as well as mentoring students through their Live Case and BUSI 540 professional consulting engagements. This is a responsibility that our team takes seriously, maybe best indicated by my dedicated position for quality. We incorporate processes of planning, doing, monitoring and acting on lessons gain from one term to the next and one year to the next. All of the following initiatives fall under the umbrella concept of Quality of Learning as specified by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) and Equis accrediting institutions.

• working from a Graduate Student Profile linked to our coursework and mentored experiences

• emphasizing consistent themes across courses: e.g., educating the whole person with specific focus on character and the quality of students' conceptual reasoning abilities

• maintaining small and active classrooms, as well as encouraging the involvement of all students in discussions

• balancing student workloads across courses to assure the doability of assignments / assessments

• selecting students with sufficient experience to contribute to the classroom experience; emphasizing diversity among students; and not reducing students to a summary statistic (GMAT score of questionable validity.

• selecting lecturers (from around the world) with both scholarly grounding and practical experience in their area of expertise: see Denis Kobzev, Paul Hansen, Julia Richardson and Beth Rose

• monitoring students' performance in our classes on a near weekly basis: to assure their success (e.g., providing mentoring help if needed) in each course

• adhering to the scholarly literature on assessment and student feedback

• conducting beginning and end-of-term reviews of each course: and using these reviews to improve the quality of our programme from term to term and year to year

• offering professional development workshops tangential to core courses; for instance to building networking and presentation skills

• and, benchmarking our courses (e.g., our strategy course against the London School of Business), and evaluate how well we stack up.  Very well, thank you!  Recent reports from our students' participation in the "Doing Business in India" and International Exchange at Duke MBA affirm the quality / rigor of our Otago MBA core courses.

The Power of Introverts

Everyone Contributes Valuable Insights!

In a prior post, I emphasized the importance of active learning and the collaborative discovery of
knowledge through shared inquiry in our classes.   Some of our students may remain reflective by nature; others may initially feel hesitant to speak in class; still others may face the challenge of thinking in one
language (e.g., Chinese) before translating thoughts into English; and differences in
culture may compel others to remain respectfully quiet.

I have included the "Power of Introverts" Ted Talk to embolden our more reflective students
and encourage more vocal students to remain culturally sensitive, respect everyone's
right to participate and strive for an inclusive learning experience.

Thank you,

David

Shared Enquiry: the path to becoming a self-reliant thinker

Shared Enquiry = the path to becoming a self-reliant thinker

Right answers do not exist in MBA-level discussions; everyone

in the classroom should actively engage in the discovery of knowledge.

The Otago MBA management team and our lecturers subscribe to an active learning model in which students participate in the learning process and daily practice their thinking skills, while demonstrating the ability to apply course material (e.g., marketing, finance, organizational leadership, economics, statistics) to complex business problems. In other words, we encourage shared enquiry as the path to becoming a self-reliant thinker, someone who can express him or herself with clarity and conviction; who can think conceptually (e.g., identify and define key terms); as well as contribute to the collaborative discovery of a deeper understanding of fundamental challenges facing global businesses.

Our students are asked to adhere to essential guidelines for engaging in productive discourse in our small seminar-style classes:

• Resist overly quick judgements
• Avoid arguing from small-N experience (e.g., we did it this way) and opinion
• Support your reasoning using credible references (e.g., course materials)
• Relate comments to the ongoing discussion
• Strive for dialogue rather than a monologue
• Seek to include all others in the conversation
• Do not direct all discussions through the lecturer
• Consider questions as a good way to enter the conversation
• Avoid dominating with comments that are too lengthy or of little interest to others
• Use courtesy and civility in all communications
• Feel encouraged to continue lively debates outside the classroom

I will have more to say about the importance of building powerful thinking

skills in future posts: we consider this as fundamental to the transformation our students

experience in our programme.

Cheers,

David

Day One: The start of MBA 38

MBA 38 - 2014 MBA Programme 

The start of MBA 38, our thirty-eighth year as an MBA programme, is rapidly approaching with orientation on Friday the 4th and classes beginning on Monday.  We have a total of 60 students across our programmes, some full-time and part-time, some just beginning their MBA and others striving to finish their capstone 540 business consulting engagement. We also unofficially have twelve nationalities represented among our students, including Australia, China (w/Hong Kong), India, Indonesia, Kiwi (Maori & Pakeha), Vietnam, South Africa, Finland, Pakistan, England and Scotland.  Their backgrounds range from IT consulting and project management, to finance/accounting, banking, healthcare, construction, public service, media/marketing, hospitality, HR consulting and film production. Plus, we have one professional snowboarder in this year's class, an individual striving to make the transition to the business side of action sports.

Our core MBA programme is designed as four terms of three courses each lasting eight weeks, with students kicking off the year in Organizational Leadership, taught by Professor Julia Richardson from York University in Canada, a perennial top lecturer in our programme; as well as Economics and Statistics & Decision Tools taught by our own standout lecturers Paul Hansen and Elizabeth (Beth) Rose, respectively.  It's an exciting time, with the Otago MBA management team striving to get everyone registered, conduct final checks on course designs, and help our students adapt to their new home.

We welcome our new students to the programme and look forward to

continuing to work with returning students.

Cheers,

David

Our Classroom: the Power of Introverts

Everyone Contributes Valuable Insights!

In a prior post, I emphasized the importance of active learning and the collaborative discovery of
knowledge through shared inquiry in our classes.   Some of our students may remain reflective by nature; others may initially feel hesitant to speak in class; still others may face the challenge of thinking in one
language (e.g., Chinese) before translating thoughts into English; and differences in
culture may compel others to remain respectfully quiet.

I have included the "Power of Introverts" Ted Talk to embolden our more reflective students
and encourage more vocal students to remain culturally sensitive, respect everyone's
right to participate and strive for an inclusive learning experience.

Thank you,

David

The Classroom: a focus on thinking

Dunedin is a city of small cafes, cozy restaurants and friends

well-suited for good conversation.

I've been a professional educator for more than twenty-five years and this topic, the classroom experience, is one about which I am passionate. You would think that, over twenty-five years, pedagogies would change and we (as educators) would become more effective in facilitating learning. Yet, too often teachers, a term very loosely defined, continue to lecture at students who passively take notes under the premise that this person is providing right answers (i.e., pearls of wisdom) concerning whatever problem businesses may face: the idea is pure nonsense.

Not at the Otago MBA!

Remember, "right" answers do not exist in MBA-level discussions and everyone

in the classroom should actively engage in the discovery of knowledge.

The Otago MBA management team subscribes to an active learning model in which students participate in the learning process and daily practice their thinking skills, while demonstrating the ability to apply course material (e.g., from marketing, finance, economics) to complex business problems. In other words, we encourage shared inquiry as the path to becoming a self-reliant thinker, someone who can express him or herself with clarity and conviction; who can think conceptually (e.g., identify and define key terms); as well as contribute to the collaborative discovery of a deeper understanding of fundamental questions facing global businesses.

Our students are asked to adhere to essential guidelines for engaging in productive discourse in our small seminar-style classes:

• Resist overly quick judgments
• Avoid arguing from small-N experience (e.g., we did it this way) and opinion
• Support your reasoning using credible references (e.g., course materials)
• Relate comments to the ongoing discussion
• Strive for dialogue rather than a monologue
• Seek to include all others in the conversation
• Do not direct all discussions through the lecturer
• Consider questions as a good way to enter the conversation
• Avoid dominating with comments that are too lengthy or of little interest to others
• Use courtesy and civility in all communications
• Feel encouraged to continue lively debates outside the classroom

I will have much more to say about the importance of building powerful thinking

 skills in future posts: we consider this as fundamental to the transformation our students

 experience in our programme.

As always, I invite you to apply now.

David