Taking on New Tech in Business Schools

• Business educators need to teach students how to think critically about applying new technologies to various contexts, rather than allowing the technologies to dominate learning experiences.
• Addressing the biases and ethical considerations associated with AI is the responsibility of both business schools and organizations alike.
• While many business schools are incorporating AI tools into their curriculum, one of the biggest challenges is keeping faculty up to date with the rapid pace of technological change.

Transcript

Tim Vorley: [0:13] I think as we move into this fourth industrial age and we're beginning to see AI really come in and play a different role, what we mustn't forget is that it is our students now and our graduates of the future that are going to be those that are responsible for using those technologies in different contexts.

[0:29] If we can teach them to think about that critically and how that technology adds value to what they know and what they do, we're in a much better position than if we're simply subservient to the technology.

Isabelle Bajeux-Besnainou: [0:40] When we think about human ingenuity and AI, we need to think about everything that can go wrong with AI. What we know for sure is that AI reproduces a lot of biases because it doesn't work on sensitivity, it's not a human. We need to make sure that humans are there to implement the solutions that are found for business problems.

[1:16] There's a lot of ethical consideration that AI cannot handle very well. There's also potentially a lot of things that are just plain wrong that would be coming from AI.

We need to make sure that humans are there to implement the solutions that are found for business problems.

Vorley: [1:32] One of the big challenges is technology moves so quickly is to ensure that faculty remain up to date. We've got researchers that are engaging in cutting-edge research about the different markets and technologies they're working with, but we need them to be able to apply these and teach them to students.

[1:47] One of the things that we're really keen to do in Oxford Brookes, we engage our faculty with businesses to see how these technologies are being used in a commercial environment. We also work with associates that we bring into the classroom to make sure that the students are getting that cutting-edge experience to understand how businesses are using these technologies.

[2:05] We've created a new marketing and social media lab at Oxford Brookes which uses commercial technologies. We have people coming in to teach on those technologies that use them day today as part of their work. That's good for the students, but it's also good for the faculty.

I cannot think about a better place than a university to teach something that is brand new, because we're doing research and we are inventing these tools within the universities.

[2:18] Again, we're trying to think about how we leverage these relationships with our partners to really maximize the value for the student experience.

Bajeux-Besnainou: [2:25] Actually, I cannot think about a better place than a university to teach something that is brand new, because we're doing research and we are inventing these tools within the universities. At the same time, we need to make sure that we're in sync with the corporate world.

[2:44] One of the issue of universities in general is that we're a little bit slower in terms of adapting our curriculum to the business world. I think one tool that is very, very effective is everything that comes with experiential learning.

[3:01] Making sure that we're in touch with the corporate world and that the research that we're doing is relevant to the corporate world. That the students are working on projects that are brought by the corporate world.

[3:14] For that, we do have a lot of the capstone projects, where the students within a classroom work with all kinds of different corporations and are bringing solutions to these corporations. With that, the professors who are supervising these students are also in touch with these corporations and making sure that everything that they're teaching is in sync.