E-Business and the education sector

Résumé du document

Taking MBA classes from home for free is now possible. The London School of Business and Finance has launched a Facebook application that enables any Facebook user to follow videos of professors delivering their courses. This new application is the beginning of a new era for spreading knowledge and education globally.
E-business in higher education is an amazing phenomenon which I appreciate and have taken advantage of. From my home town in France, I am able to follow programs in two American universities at the same time. The ISM program makes it possible to post our assignments on-line, retrieve all the information the professors ask us to acknowledge and read, receive grades and feedbacks, use the on-line library. With the San Diego Community College I don't even attend classes physically; it is a full on-line program. I have electronic textbooks, exercises, quizzes and exams that don't even require Microsoft softwares because everything is filled in on-line. If I need a transcript, I push the transcript button that automatically sends me the grades. This amazing improvement is beneficial for me, but I can't imagine how revolutionary it is for handicapped people who never entertained the possibility of attending classes physically or for people already working two jobs and who would normally never be able to have a flexible schedule to attend classes but still wanted to obtain a degree.

Extraits

[...] Freedman, “Unlocking the Global Education Imperative” , PDF provided by Blackboard, n.d, http://www.blackboard.com/CMSPages/GetFile.aspx?guid=6032f8df-b6ba-4510- 81d2-3198459529dc, accessed on the 13th of December 2010. J.Mitchell (2002), «The effective use of electronic business in the education sector”, ebusiness in Education, case study provided by NOIE (National Office for the Information Economy) http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/APCITY/UNPAN015715.pdf , accessed on 7th of December 2010. WEBSITE: LSBF, Global MBA, It Works”, http://apps.facebook.com/lsbfglobalmba/?type=discovery, accessed on the 8th of December. S. Shearman, “LSBF offering free MBA on Facebook”, Marketing Magazine, web article, 1st November 2010, http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/news/1038156/LSBF-offering-free-MBA- Facebook/, accessed on 8th December 2010. [...]

[...] The implementation of business is complex and should be incremental. Deciding to convert to business for one single application already requires planning and organization work. When implementing processes and technologies to transpose data, there is a high risk for mistakes so the project has to be very well planned. Projects can take a few years before they start functioning. A common mistake observed by J.Mitchell (2002)[3] during his research, is that educational administrators tend to focus on selecting the technology, instead of being clear about user concerns. [...]

[...] The critic is often that the for-profit pure players prefer to use the same content one can obtain traditionally because it is cheaper than investing in expensive multimedia that really makes a difference in the quality of the service. The number of students taking additional classes online is increasing 45% every year (C. Gustke), mainly High school students that take a foreign language online to prepare for university applications' competitiveness. Public and private educations are competing with the pure players that provide another dimension to learning. Students can have education at any time of the day, on any day of the week, and any day in the year. [...]

[...] The universities will be connected through social networking and collaborate in order to diffuse quality information faster and to more people. Another project is meant to adapt to the life continuing education students. Because people tend to jump from education to professional life and vice versa a few times in their life, they could have an ePortfolio-for-life that keeps track of their academic and career life accomplishments. Blackboard has clients all around the world; they have acquired their biggest competitor WebCT in 2006, which makes their leadership in Corporate Learning Solutions undeniable. [...]

[...] The social part of education is deteriorated. Blackboard would argue that through their online portals students have access to a forum and web 2.0 technologies that enable them to talk instantly to their fellow students. But this interaction cannot be compared to a real class situation, where students are shy and have to make big efforts to trespass their timidity. They don't have to do live improvisation to answer a professor's direct question; they don't have to care about how they can express themselves orally, whether they speak loud enough Finally they don't make any oral presentations in front of a class. [...]