Innovation continues to reshape the world with the emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Industry 4.0, Big Data Analytics, Social Media and Smart Devices, likewise, the academia and industry need to be transformed to cope up with this digital era. These disruptive technologies hold great promise for increasing access to information, also it paves way for new methodologies in learning and teaching that never have thought possible even a few years ago.
Present-day students are tech-savvy and want the same technical agility from their instructors so that the latter utilizes technology to enhance the learning experience for the students. With the advent of the pandemic, the move towards digital tools become indispensable, as it has become vital for students to have opportunities to understand, create, and utilise emerging and disruptive technologies to develop critical thinking skills to remain into the competition.
Innovative ways to satiate Future Workforce
Online education has become pervasive and sophisticated in the last five years; with the advent of learning management system, integrated learning tools, collaborative discussion boards that can engage students both in real-time and in asynchronous learning experiences. Mobile devices are themselves a major disruptive invention which allows students a new way of knowing, perceiving, and interacting with greater flexibility to have access to learning.
With the emergence of big data and convergence of millions of data points, it has been easier to personalize the learning experience, to ensure greater student’s success in the digital medium. As the job market continuously changes, higher education must prepare students for the next generation workforce dominated by Millennials and Zoomers, who will develop and reshape the future of technology, as organizations need to find innovative ways to do business.
Disruptive Innovations are simpler, more convenient and less expensive products that appeal to new or less-demanding customers that integrates into the organisatioz’s overall strategy to gain an innovative competitive advantage.
Role of Social Media & Mobile Apps in Responsible Management Education
In the past 10-15 years, social media have emerged to become the most used communication and information sharing tools globally, and it has been found that modern generation spends substantial time on social media platforms; the digital native resort to technology when gathering up any information. This new reality needs to be recognised and embraced as a significant tool to impart responsible management education.
The use of trending and popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram to enhance student interaction has become a trend and may offer a more holistic experiential learning experience to enhance a responsible manager’s behaviour.
Additionally, mobile apps may also act as a technological tool for information dissemination when mobile phones have become the lifeline to the outside world amid stay-at-home orders. This explains why mobile app designing industry is one of the fastest-growing industry, and academics have already started to understand the potentiality involved in using mobile apps for management education.
Mobile apps also provide an opportunity to educate the future managers in responsible management, so they focus on various issues related to different stakeholders like consumers, communities, governments, NGOs, natural environments, and learn to tackle different aspects of the business including corporate social responsibility, environmental sustainability and ethical business practices.
Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation Model is here to stay
Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen coined the word “Disruptive Innovation” to simplify his disruption theory that can also be aptly applied to how higher education is moving on in the current era, with its lowered price and quality offering to attract the attention of the Millennial. Disruptive Theory provides an incontrovertible argument for the need to push beyond the campus status quo, so they survive and do not follow the fatal fate of the newspapers, an industry that has been thoroughly disrupted by the advent of the internet. A strategic initiative that gains traction are those that resonate the models of change. If higher education has to change, it has to do it along the lines of start-ups or disruptive innovators.
GBS Online forays into Online Education World
Globsyn Business School laurelled as the only Corporate B-School for decades, and has embraced this disruptive innovation for education through its Online Education Portal called Globsyn Business School Online. It offers a gamut of higher education courses taught completely in online asynchronous mode. The reception has been phenomenal among the online learners and the portal has evolved as a torchbearer during the worldwide lockdown period when everybody was stuck in their own home. GBS Online caters to all kinds of online learners with its plethora of online courses under advanced subjects like Online Digital Marketing, Human Resource, Finance and Accountancy, Popular Foreign Languages, Vocational Courses and many more. The learners will get a digitally verified course completion certificate upon each course completion, which they can share and download, at their will.
Technology is no more just a tool for education, rather in this Post Covid-19 era;the perception is that education is completely dependent on digital technology. Management guru Peter Drucker predicted back in 1998 that “Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics” – It now seems he was right as we are now in the midst of internet revolution and massification of higher education.