Dr. Nikos Mylonopoulos, Associate Professor of Digital Business at ALBA Graduate Business School at The American College of Greece, and Edtech Academic Director, stated that management education institutions should be looking several decades into the future. “We are educating student today for the next 30 or 40 years. It is our responsibility to look deep into the future, and decide how we are going to best prepare them for that kind of future.”
Prof. Primož Krašovec, Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana, gave a broad perspective of what lies ahead of us: “Educators should take into consideration the changes in knowledge acquisition that are happening with young people today. For young people today not just the content expressed in language, but also its visual packaging is very important. Something that moves, or is animated, things like movies, videos.”
The participants presented some good practices of new models of teaching and learning. Sami Soinio a junior researcher, and responsible for IT/Data Management related courses at Estonian Business School, presented how they introduced Learning Management System – Canvas - at his university, and stated that the biggest challenge for educational institutions in Europe is to get a sense of urgency. “We are slowly adapting these new technologies. The seminar for me was useful especially for the networking and I see a lot of opportunity there to collaborate in the future and mutually tackle the problem.”
Participant Davor Vlajčić, Faculty of Economics, Zagreb, who introduced an Online course at his university, stated that we need to be aware that digitalization is transforming management itself to a new version of management, therefor educational institutions need to offer programs that would serve this new business and management models.
Eleni Lamprou, an Online Faculty Member at Laureate Online Education and an Associate Research Fellow at ALBA Graduate Business School at the American College of Greece, emphasized that what was discussed and became quite clear was that in order to disrupt educational practices and move to an on line setting we also need to be prepared to disrupt the managerial practices within the educational institutions. “Educational institutions appear to be too rigid and too settled into traditional way of doing education and of managing the process of education”.
CEEMAN IQA director Dr. Alenka Braček Lalić presented final results of transnational research project titled: Management and Leadership Development Needs in Dynamically Changing Societies on the second day of EdTech seminar. The results show digitalization is of the main challenges.
“With implementing new models we need committed and enthusiastic individuals who are willing to pass on the message to their institutions and maybe start with small projects where they can demonstrate the potential value of an alternative way of doing education”, pointed out Ms. Lamprou.
