Examining the nature of reflective learning in an online MBA; a dialogic approach

The debate around the relevance of management education to practice is a long standing one. Critics argue that conventional, lectured-based teaching does not attend to practitioners’ needs and their complex realities. Critical management education has been held up as an alternate teaching pedagogy that speaks more adequately to practice. A starting point for a critical pedagogy may be a social constructivist approach where students actively construct their own knowledge and meanings rather than passively receive information. The essence of critical management education is to create more spaces to promote a questioning attitude towards practice and theory and help management students to become active, reflective learners. So far, investigations of criticality seem to have largely drawn on exploring management students’ perspectives about their learning experience. Little evidence is available on what becoming more or less critical entails for management students from within practice. There is no mention of a rigorous framework that would offer insights about what to look for in investigating reflective learning from within its natural setting. As an area that appears to be under developed in critical management education research, the nature of reflective learning evoked in classroom dialogue is considered, and a framework is devised based on Bakhtin’s dialogism to help identify and conceptualize reflective learning. The availability of online courses has grown strongly over the past two decades. A number of commentators consequently see that online management learning is becoming a mainstream aspect of higher education. Yet, serious reservations against the nature of learning that an asynchronous, text-based learning environment can offer management students have been raised. Therefore, an online MBA classroom is chosen as the site of this study. Data is collected through a combination of observations of online classroom conversations and document analysis. The proposed framework is used is to carry out a relational analysis of online, text-based classroom conversations. It is not the asynchronicity of the setting that is inherently problematic in stimulating reflective, emancipatory learning. The potential of online management classrooms to engender dialogic, reflective learning amongst management students responds to the wider critiques of the status of learning in management classrooms. A critical approach to online teaching, which is not underpinned by a critical curriculum, is proposed. There is an urgent need to attend to the role of online tutors and their influence on the nature of learning, which occurs in their conversations with students in virtual classrooms. The study opens up the scope for assessing online management learning as a “dialogical construction of meaning” and offers insights into the online setting beyond the passive portrayals of learners

Developing Critical Reflection in Asynchronous Discussions; the Role of the Instructor

We report on a study of how instructors in an online management classroom aim to develop critical reflection through asynchronous discussions. There is an ongoing debate centered on improving asynchronous discussions in online management education but insights into how these discussions could be facilitated to promote critical reflection remains largely under-developed. We address this issue by considering the extent to which management instructors’ perception of their role and understanding of being critical impact their facilitation of asynchronous classroom discussions and the challenges associated with this facilitation. Results from 18 semi-structured interviews with instructors teaching in an online MBA program at a UK higher education institution show the potential of asynchronous discussions to promote critical reflection. However, we found that instructors often fail to capitalize on opportunities for critical reflection that arise from classroom diversity and dynamics. Despite the emancipatory intent that underlies program design, interview data reveals three specific areas of interest: the diversity of instructors’ interpretations of what constitutes being critical in asynchronous discussions, a range of individualized facilitation strategies and the impact of imposed design constraints. We offer suggestions as to how to improve the facilitation of critical reflection through asynchronous discussions as well as directions for future research. </jats:p

What can managers learn online? Investigating possibilities for active understanding in the online MBA classroom

Online MBAs have become integral to business schools’ portfolios and the number of MBA students opting for an online version looks set to grow. In the wake of well documented critiques of traditional MBA formats, this expansion prompted us to examine the potential for critically reflexive learning ideals in asynchronous MBA learning environments. Building the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model we elaborate elements of Bakhtin and Shotter’s dialogism to develop the notion of ‘active understanding’ as a means to study an online MBA classroom. We present two illustrative episodes to show how aspects of active understanding may unfold and we point to the role of infrastructure, curriculum and instructor interventions in developing more genuine dialogical exchanges. Our findings suggest that online MBA course designers can learn from CoI approaches to which we add that critically reflexive learning is situationally sensitive; requiring the capacity to create and recognize nuance and difference in the written communication; making the other the focus of learning. We conclude with implications for pedagogy and technology infrastructure