education

 by Brendon J. Wilson

The MBA Patch

When I originally applied for admission to MBA programs at UBC and SFU last year, I had to produce a number of essays in response to the universities’ “interview” questions. Looking back on my answers to questions, I can’t believe how naive I was about the MBA program. Consider my essay answer to this question: “Discuss your career plans and how the UBC MBA will contribute to your achievement of these plans”.

My career goal is to start a successful venture that addresses a current social need using technology, thereby combining my passion for improving our world with my expertise in high-tech. I believe that we, as a society, could be doing a better job of leveraging our technological expertise to reduce our society’s impact on the environment, and improve the lives of people outside of the First World. Instead of wasting our intellectual capital on inventing the next high-tech gadget to temporarily occupy our attention, we could be addressing the real problems our shortsighted society has created.

I’ve always admired the pioneers of new technology with the capability to change the way we live. These people aren’t empire builders, like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but are true visionaries, like Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy. These are people that have an idea, build a team to grow the idea into a business, execute the idea successfully, and then move onto their next big idea. These are people that get things done, fast and effectively. But the ability of these leaders to make a difference requires not only technological savvy, but business expertise as well.

A successful business can’t be built on technology alone, something I know from the three start-ups I’ve been a part of during my short professional career. Though an innovative technology may be enough to start a business, by itself it’s not enough to sustain a business to profitability. Many of the problems I observed within each start-up were due to inadequate business experience on the part of the management team. Founders and executives focused on the “gee-whiz” factor of the technology, the thrill of being “in business”, or on petty ego-based battles for control, instead of addressing the more important issues of cash-flow management, competitive analysis, market penetration, or sales strategy. In the heady “dot-com” days, the business plans for these companies were nothing more than promises of “if you build it, and they will come”, something that anyone with an MBA would have recognized as foolish (though perhaps many MBAs recognized this foolishness, and chose to cash in on the dot-com frenzy anyway).

I believe what I need at this point in my career now is an MBA program that will allow me to examine the experience I’ve already gained, thereby gleaning further insight into how to build my own profitable venture. Though there’s no substitute for real-world “battle” experience, I’ve learned more in three years with start-ups than I would have at a traditional, well-established company. But this experience has been expensive, costing the most precious resource of all: time. I believe the UBC MBA program will accelerate my progress towards my goal by providing me with the formal framework to analyze my existing experience and the tools to tackle the challenges ahead.

Wow. Painfully bright-eyed, bushy-tailed optimism, eh? You can almost see the sun rising in East, gleaming off my eyes as I stare to the West to a brighter future in the MBA program. Sucker.

The truth of the matter is the MBA is a rubber stamp degree. It’s like those patches in Boy Scouts which, oddly enough, you can buy on the Internet: Foul Weather Camping! Outdoor Cook! Patch Forgery!

The MBA isn’t a guarantee of anything, except possibly that you possess the ability to be punctual and remain conscious for an extended period of time. And even those guarantees are to be taken with a grain of salt.

Was I wrong to expect some quantifiable, identifiable results from the program, or was I just expecting too much? I’ve always suffered from high (some would say unrealistic) expectations. If there’s one thing the MBA has taught me: caveat emptor.

in Personal 3 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

A Better Way

Universities puzzle me in their approach to teaching students. Equally puzzling is the metrics we use to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of university education. These institutions are the engines of innovation, yet despite the constant influx of public funds into unviersities, they seem to exist in a perpetual state of under-funding. How could we improve the university system to maximize the value for dollar?

To start with: could we be getting more value out of professors’ time? It seems to me that professors spend an inordinate amount of time on activities that could be consolidated across institutions. For example, how many professors prepare new notes, slides, exam questions and assignments for a course that they’re teaching for the first time? And yet how few of those professors pass that material along to the next professor that teaches the course?

Wouldn’t it make sense for any material prepared by a professor to be shared as widely as possible? Of course, some in the academic community point out that this material is subject to copyright, but come on people, just how many different ways is it possible to reincarnate the material in a first year physics course? Isn’t sharing information a core principle in the heart of the academic community?

A first step: establish an open source online repository for learning materials that professors can check out, update as required, and check back in. I envision a library of notes, quiz questions, exam questions and lab experiments that educators could mix and match as required by their course. As the best and brightest minds make incremental improvements to the materials in response to student feedback, the repository would approach the “best” way to present university material.

The potential benefits to professors are enormous: less time on class preparation, less time spent by students on copying down notes (assuming all the materials are available electronically) leading to better class discussions and improved comprehension of class material. Universities could even eliminate course textbooks, allowing them to raise tuition without protest; after all, what’s an extra $20 a credit hour if you don’t have to spend $100 on a course textbook?

With such a repository of learning materials, quiz and exam questions, it would only be a matter of time before people started knitting this information together into comprehensive online courseware. Imagine being able to sit at your computer, read about a topic, answering questions after each section of reading to test your understanding. The next step would be intelligent software that would “branch” after each set of questions, proceeding to the next topic if you achieved a satisfactory score on the questions, or proceeding to an alternate format of presenting the material if you didn’t. Really intelligent software might even customize its choice of presentation format over time to match a student’s preferred learning style (learn by example, visual learner, etc).

Why aren’t we doing this now? Well, in fact there are a number of efforts to produce these learning object repositories using existing technologies, such as XML and the World Wide Web. But the development of this technology has been slow, most likely the result of how we evaluate the effectiveness of our university education system. You only have to look at the methodology used to generate university rankings, such as Maclean’s University Rankings or the Financial Times MBA Rankings, to realize that university rankings have little to do with the quality of education received by students. Since when was the number of publications generated by faculty a reliable measure of how well a student is being taught? Or the amount of grants received by faculty?

If we’re really concerned about how well the minds of tomorrow are being shaped, we need to re-align our method for evaluating and ranking universities to coincide with our goals for post-secondary education. Only in that fashion will the incentives be properly fashioned to prompt universities to take the corrective actions required to adopt new teaching technology, freeing professors to do more research done and, in turn, improve our country’s ability to innovate.

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