E-Learning Performance and Students’ Results Case of a French Business School

E-learning experiments in higher education are becoming more recurrent. However, these experiments are seldom tangibly applied to an entire academic year group. Integrating e-learning into a pedagogical program implies performance analysis in terms of both students and teachers, but also from the institute’s point of view. Due to the lack of Information Systems based research into e-learning performance modeling, the article propose an analysis mixing this research area with some findings in Education Sciences. The first part of this article presents an analysis of the main scientific publications on which we have built our research model. The second part presents the initial findings of our on-going research project at Montpellier Business School (France). A comparison between traditional teaching and face-to-face teaching was carried out using the student marks in five different courses of study. The results show that the teachers’ predisposition to adopting these new teaching techniques is not directly related to an improvement in the students\u27 results. In other words, the paper is consistent with the need to avoid any techno-centered approach to on-line education. In the same way, the article concludes that a measure of the e-learning performance must not be limited to the students’ results alone. Indeed, the case studied puts forward that the legitimacy of an e-learning project can lie more in the satisfaction of being able to meet new strategic challenges through its development, than in simply improving an existing teaching tool

Convergence and divergence dynamics in British and French business schools: how will the pressure for accreditation influence these dynamics?

This paper focuses on convergence and divergence dynamics among leading British and French business schools and explores how the pressure for accreditation influences these dynamics. We illustrate that despite historical differences in approaches to management education in Britain and France, these approaches have converged partly based on the influence of the American model of management education but more recently through the pursuit of accreditation, in particular AASCB and EQUIS. We explore these dynamics through the application of the resource-based view of the firm and institutional theory and suggest that whilst achieving accreditation is a necessary precursor for international competition, it is no longer a form of competitive advantage. The pursuit of accreditation has fostered a form of competitive mimicry reducing national distinctiveness. The resource-based view of the firm suggests that the top schools need a more heterogeneous approach that is not easily replicable if they are to outperform the competitors. Consequently, the convergence of management education in Britain and France will become a new impetus for divergence. We assert that future growth and competitive advantage might be better achieved through the reassertion of national, regional and local cultural characteristics

Social representation of competition and fraud

Good citizenship includes fair competitive strategies. Dishonest competitive behaviour – such as fraud – can reflect the absence of one main characteristic of good citizenship as mindfulness of laws and social rules. This article investigates the social representation of competition and fraud with two samples of students from business schools in France and in Hungary. Two complementary studies were carried out with P. Vergès’ associative method and C. Flament and M. L. Rouquette’s tools. The purpose of the first study (NFrench=104, NHungarian=107) is to characterize the central core of the respondents’ representation of both competition and fraud. On the basis of different cultural, historical and economic backgrounds, it was expected that the concepts of fraud and competition would overlap more extensively among Hungarian students than among French students. Results from the first study suggest only slight differences regarding the content of the representations; moreover, in both samples the representations of competition and fraud lacked significant overlap. Hungarian representations of competition and fraud are characterized by a lower level of coherence. Furthermore, academic cheating is mentioned more frequently by Hungarian students than by French students. Following the methodological guidelines of social representations, in order to confirm the results of the first study, a second investigation was carried out (NFrench=115, NHungarian=127) with an alternative associative method. These results confirmed the first study in terms of the content of the social representations and differences regarding coherence. Finally, in the case of Hungarian students a higher prevalence of reference to academic cheating, and links between fraud and competition were found. Hungarians’ competitive result orientation, linked social representations of competition and fraud via a higher prevalence of academic cheating which can refer to the weaker inclination of Hungarians in terms of rule keeping behaviours, which is one of the hallmarks of a good citizen

Impacts of School Organization and Signaling on Incentives to Learn in France, the Netherlands, England, Scotland and the United States

[Excerpt] Despite similar cultural roots and standards of living, the secondary education systems of France, the Netherlands, England, Scotland and the United States produce remarkably different levels of achievement in mathematics and science. When one examines achievement at a given age. the French and Dutch have learned the most. Americans the least and the British are somewhere in between. In reading ability, however, the students of the five countries are roughly equal. High achievement in France and the Netherlands has not been achieved by pushing slow students out of upper secondary school. The ratios of upper secondary students to the age cohort are as high in France and tbe Netherlands as in the U.S. and far ahead of England and Scotland. What accounts for this pattern