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| Universities challenged by the pace of business change |
March 5, 2002 |
By Geoff Dennis
DR. SHELLEY RINEHART REMEMBERS THERE WERE A LOT OF QUESTIONS in the air when she taught her first e-commerce class in 1997.
“They were risk-takers—all after the big jobs—but no one really knew what e-commerce was about,” she said of that inaugural group at the University of New Brunswick’s Electronic Commerce Centre (ECC) in Saint John. “That’s all changed now. It’s not just the slicksters anymore; ecommerce is for everyone.”
Much has changed in five years. Back then, e-commerce was uncharted waters: the Internet was still in its infancy, Year 2000 worries were merely a whisper and the word “dot-com” was hardly chic. But students flocked to e-commerce courses just the same, just as they do today.
If it was hard to keep current then, it’s even harder now for Canadian universities to teach at Internet speed. Training the e-commerce leaders of tomorrow means universities must keep ahead of the business curve. As the acting dean of UNB’s Faculty of Business and the director of the ECC, it’s Rinehart’s job to ensure that the university is up-to-date.
As more students clamoured for admission she created an MBA e-commerce stream and ensured some courses were taught online. The mix of courses changes constantly, with customer relationship management and e-marketing topics added as needed.
“Our curriculum has to be grounded in business fundamentals, so we rely on feedback from the business community,” she said, adding that the ECC was founded on the backing from partners such as Nortel Networks, Sun Microsystems and NBTel.
“I wouldn’t say there are no rules, I’d rather say that the roadmap is constantly changing.”
That roadmap is being charted across Canada. Hamilton’s McMaster University became the first institution in Ontario to offer an MBA in e-business and the second in the country, after the University of New Brunswick.
Dr. Elliot Schreiber, McMaster’s industry professor of eBusiness, explains that after the dot-com crash student interest dwindled, and consequently the faculty changed its program. Like the thousands of failing dot-coms, the school quickly learned that teaching e-commerce was much more than
Web sites and technology—it had to be grounded in traditional business strategy.
“We got a little enamoured with the technological approach originally,” Schreiber said. “As the market evolved so did we, and now we are trying to teach our students how to develop good business models, not just nice Web sites. It’s an interesting field to teach because young people seem to know more than the older generation.”
Schreiber joined McMaster after 20 years as an executive with companies like Nortel and Digital 4Sight. Recruiting from the business community is the best way to find gifted professors, but he said it’s also the hardest route, and finding more faculty members for growing e-commerce programs is the biggest challenge facing Canadian universities today.
“This will be an issue for every university in Canada.Without the proper faculty, we can’t teach (more new courses),” he said, noting that the business community simply has more money to throw at salaries and benefits, and that means they often win the tug-of-war that goes on for the best people.
While the universities play catch-up, some critics fear they will never quite be up to speed. Stephen Downes, information architect for the University of Alberta, commends the work that has been done thus far but he said that universities can always do more.
“From what I’ve seen, the material being taught is more up-to-date than in most other programs. Business students are being taught things like knowledge management, data mining, network economics and more. Stuff that isn’t in the mainstream is already in the business classroom,” he said. “But that said, there is a certain lag between cutting-edge practices and what is taught in business classes.”
Downes said that online learning is the next step in e-commerce education.
He penned a report called “The Future of Online Learning” in which he criticizes the e-practices of today. “I would have expected a much greater use of multi-user simulations—emulating a real business environment. A lot of what’s online is simply what happens in the classroom transferred into an online environment.”
But Downes also said that online learning is still in the development phase, and that one day it will help students and instructors work more efficiently.
Web learning
Future of Online Learning
www.atl.ualberta.ca/downes/future/home.html
McMaster University
www.mcmaster.ca
Stephen Downes’ homepage
www.downes.ca
University of Alberta
www.ualberta.ca
University of New Brunswick
www.unb.ca
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