Learning on demand, at your own pace, in rapid bite-sized-chunks: the future shape of management development?

Abstract Recent decades have witnessed an unprecedented growth in management and executive education which, paradoxically, has been accompanied by a crisis of confidence manifested in debates about its direction, relevance, and effectiveness. Outside academia, innovative corporate training enterprises increasingly provide the type of management training where learning is distributed at the time of need, embedded in a work context, and delivered in rapid "bite-sized pieces," which aim to meet participants' needs in terms of depth of information coverage, timeliness of delivery, and job relatedness. We draw on a series of interviews associated with one such enterprise that is believed to be an exemplar for innovative thinking in this field to explore the possibility that innovations of this type may have something to offer other mainstream providers of management learning and education in terms of the type and style of delivery employed

Material conflict: MOOCs and institutional logics in business education

Although the notion of incompatibility is implicit in the research on conflicting institutional logics, few studies explicitly address it. The chapter draws on the concept of materiality and theories of digital objects to explain how materiality affects the organizational templates and reasons for the conflict. The chosen context of Massive Open Online Course (MOOCS) contradicts the conventional organizing templates in business schools (BS) but it emerges a powerful force regardless. The focus on digital materiality helps us to elaborate the role of materiality in institutional logics. By juxtaposing and reconciling the substance of the physical mater and the substantive mattering of matter, the chapter enhances the definition and the theoretical boundaries of the concept

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7