How have the leading business schools adapted their courses to the Covid-19 crisis?

Higher education is undergoing some major changes. What does its future hold? Will remote learning mean a change in course content or quality? Or in the very nature of teaching as a profession?


The weeks go by, the lockdowns come and go... but what about the consequences? It seems that, because of the health crisis, the world of work is changing faster than ever before with working from home becoming the norm. Essentially, the crisis has made it inevitable. It would seem that the same debate applies to teaching in business schools.

All of a sudden, digital technology has made a sensational entrance into business schools, just as it has in the rest of so-called higher education. As teachers at these institutions, we have all pivoted in our teaching practices from face-to-face to Zoom, Teams, Webex, Jitsi and other online conferencing tools with varying degrees of effort, success and discomfort, in the space of one week. In June, we were all saying that nothing would ever be the same again. However, many considered it business as usual as soon as the new school year started, as if what we experienced during the spring had never happened, as if there would be no second wave… and yet in November some had to pivot again, but this time in the space of 24 hours.

It is a huge change, but it is only an acceleration of what Michel Serres pointed out in Thumbelina: the outsourcing of knowledge (cloud) which alters the legitimacy of the transmitter and ends up modifying what they are transmitting. It is therefore not only the means of transmission that changes, but the content, and thus ultimately the teacher's position and what is expected of the learner is transformed. The outsourcing of knowledge is the great transformation. It has existed since the invention of writing, has accelerated with the Internet, and continues to intensify. Why learn by heart what Google can tell me in 2 clicks or even in one question? Although there are some types of knowledge that we need to master (reading, counting, behavior) other types of knowledge can be left somewhere to be used when needed. Our first responsibility would therefore be to filter out and then pass on the best practices to our students. The outsourcing of knowledge means the end of the expert professor who is master of all aspects of a given field. Just as with organizations, the hierarchical relationship is flattened. I am not above my students; I am alongside them as a guide. The point is to get them thinking of learning as a lifelong endeavor, to give them the means to keep learning after their schooling rather than making them believe that once they have their degree there will be nothing more to learn.

This transition combined with distance raise the issue of attention and engagement. It was understood before the health crisis that the challenge of the digital world is to capture attention and engage users. And the big problem we are experiencing today with remote teaching is precisely the difficulty in maintaining students' attention and engaging them. But is this really a new debate? How many times have we heard colleagues complain about lack of attention in the classroom, or students’ passivity and lack of interest? Are teachers becoming the Community Managers of their groups of learners?

Will teachers (in higher education) disappear? Transfer? As Darwin said, only the fittest survive. What would it take to be the fittest in this case? One could imagine replacing teachers with learning coaches or knowledge facilitators. In any case, we are also going to change because the world is changing and therefore the teaching methods and content must also change. This in no way impacts the level of excellence to be achieved, quite the contrary - it obliges us to return to the essence of higher education: enabling our learners to grow.

Exergue: “It is therefore not only the means of transmission that changes, but the content, and thus ultimately the teacher's position and what is expected of the learner is transformed.”
Exergue : “Will teachers disappear? Transfer? As Darwin said, only the fittest survive. What would it take to be the fittest in this case? One could imagine replacing teachers with learning coaches or knowledge facilitators.”

Written by Céline Bos Chamoux, teacher and Coordinator of the Master's program in Management and Corporate Strategy at ESDES Lyon Business School.

Article published in Les Echos (in French)