Returning to Business School in the New Normal

Thierry Picq is the director of early makers development and Professor and Director of Innovation at Emlyon Business School.

When it comes to his role, he said: “My mission is to help to develop a culture of innovation and experimentation in schools, with a particular focus on transforming our pedagogical model.

“Of course, the Covid crisis has accelerated this transformation, particularly due to the fact that all of our courses moved online.”  

In April 2020, Thierry became the Head of the Covid Crisis Unit when the school realized activities would be affected for quite some time.

Thierry says Emlyon kept its planned September return dates for its programs – while ensuring students and professors could return to campus safely.

He said: “There are many aspects to be taken into account in terms of organization. The quality of the courses, health management, life on campus, communication with students and staff, risk management at all levels, relationship with international students who aren’t able or willing to come to France now.”

However, Emlyon’s new pedagogical model is aimed at flexibility and agility, allowing students to switch between face-to-face, remote or hybrid models quickly, making this new normal of education easier to navigate.

He said: “The main reason for this is to adapt to uncertain conditions which can change rapidly. Long term, we want to keep this flexibility to offer students a multi-channel pedagogy. Students could choose to follow all or part of the program in different formats.”

But looking back over the past six months, when courses needed to be moved online quickly, Thierry says the switch to online teaching was very well received by students.

Thierry said: “Our faculty have made a lot of effort to adapt. Of course, this generated more work and stress for professors and external speakers. We are setting up a support and training system to help teachers to continue to develop their teaching practices.”

Now, more than ever, flexible learning is important, to ensure teaching continuity. Thierry said: “Beyond adapting to change, we believe the behavior of our learners is evolving towards a need for increasing modularity, to better adapt to their needs of running different types of parallel activities.

“We internally call this emerging model: “Netflix”, where students can learn when they want, where they want, through their chosen format.”

Dr Sam Solaimani has held the position of Director of Full-time MBA programs and Assoc. Professor of Digital Transformation and Emerging Technologies at Nyenrode Business University since 2018.

Nyenrode’s MBA class of 2020/21 will return to campus on September 9, following the program’s official academic start of September 1. Sam said: “We are doing our best to do as much face to face on-campus as possible, but the percentage depends on the purpose/importance of the session, intended venue and number of students, and state of the pandemic in our country.

“In addition, we have an open-door policy: our students can reach out to professors for additional sessions, questions and meetings. All our program-teams monitor the possibilities of face-to-face activities every week.”

Over the past few months, because of global restrictions, Sam says the b-school had to revisit some program components and introduce new ones, meaning his team’s agility, creativity, and resilience was put to the ultimate test.

He said: “We had to collaborate more than ever with stakeholders, especially students, to find a novel workaround, but also new things that we had never tried before, such as moving education entirely online in just a few days.”

But Sam admits they made some ‘brilliant’ mistakes in the process which helped to optimize non-face-to-face processes. He said: “The post-covid-19 life will, therefore, never be the same because we are a better educator with a more balanced online-offline education.”

As Nyenrode returns to campus, Sam acknowledges that the b-school needed to pull out all the stops to facilitate social distancing, maintain hygiene measures for the workforce as well as visitors and students.

He said: “Fortunately, Nyenrode has been able to rely on corporate partner loyalty. A lot of effort was needed from program management to organize company visitations; however, combined with some new virtual components, we were able to facilitate face-to-face contact with the business market.

“Was it difficult? Yes. Was it worth it? Absolutely. We believe effective business education is limited, if not less effective, without face-to-face components.”

Sam says Covid-19 and its business, social, and financial consequences will play an essential role in education. He said: “Our career services will focus on changes in the labor market. We will continue ‘blendifying’ our program, a strategy we established at our university a few years ago and has been accelerated since the crisis.

“We hope to optimize our blended program further and apply what we have learned in the past few years, especially in the past few months to the program.”