WEBINAR – EQUAL Meet the Expert Series

Join us for this first edition of EQUAL Meet the Expert Series!

Integrating sustainability/social responsibility into our business schools has become an imperative. Doing this spans a wide range of stakeholders and activities: students, faculty, staff, curriculum, governance, norms and regulations, impact, our broader ecosystems (alumni, corporate partners, and other stakeholders)… Many schools face challenges on how to proceed while many best practices exist to be shared. AT EQUAL Network we are convinced that this is a collective endeavor and that the more these best practices can be shared, the stronger the collective progress will be.

In this very first edition of the EQUAL Meet the Expert Series, in collaboration with EFMD Global, we invite Willem Fourie, Founder of South African SDG Hub, Associate Professor, University Pretoria, to share his views on the SDGs and their place in management education.

REGISTER NOW and be part of this important discussion.

This free webinar is open to all EQUAL members and their membership. 

COVID-19, Updates and Activities in the Network

We at EQUAL Network are aware of and closely monitoring the Coronavirus pandemic situation in Europe.

Europe & the whole globe, our countries, our university systems and networks, our institutions and ourselves are going through very unusual, challenging and difficult times.

EQUAL Network brings together associations and communities in Management Education and Research and plays the role of a central and sharing node of those networks. Would you have resources for our communities on how you are coping with this unusual situation, please do not hesitate to share. Many of us are moving from face-to-face to online teaching, from collective work to work-from-home with e-solutions, from conferences and events projects to new solutions for research production and dissemination.

We hope we all can learn from one another and share experiences.

Stay safe and take care,

Jérôme Rive, EQUAL Chair & Andrzej Popadiuk, EQUAL Vice-Chair

List updated on 20 April 2020

EFMD established a temporary space on the EFMD blog, where business schools, L&D providers, organizations or individuals can share their experience, examples of best practice or resources they’d like to circulate within the EFMD community. For activities and events, you can follow this link to see updates on all EFMD activities.  Below are a few upcoming offerings you might be interested in.

GMAC has a dedicated webpage for all updates happening in its activities.  The online interim GMAT™ exam will be launched in mid-April, for more information please refer to this webpage.

SET Project: Student Evaluations of Teaching, Measuring and Enhancing Course Quality and Teaching Quality

This research conducted by Ad Scheepers, SET Project: Student Evaluations of Teaching, Measuring and Enhancing Course Quality and Teaching Quality, shows that student evaluation should be viewed as a process, as a cycle. One of the important steps in this cycle is the interpretation of the data, and that obviously depends on the aim identified when constructing the instrument. This can go from improving the teaching, quality assurance or appraising teachers.

The literature review allowed to pull out some interesting recommendations on each of the SET process stages. Most of the previous studies do not focus on the whole SET process but are fragmented. The main concerns centred around reliability, validity, and bias.

During the field study, current practices were studied in 50 European and non-European business schools for the different SET process stages. The main conclusions on establishing a good practice are:

  • Use a multidimensional instrument for assessing teaching effectiveness and quality rather than one global measure.
  • Do not make the questionnaire too complicated and use core dimensions and a minimal number of items per dimension to guarantee reliability. This will also increase response rates.
  • Check reliability regularly and systematically. This will also counter bias.
  • Response rates are a big concern, but it does not have to be problematic. Either the sample should be sufficiently representative or SET should be made mandatory and an integral part of a course or module.
  • When SET is used for HR purposes, such as tenure and promotion, additional sources of information should be available and used.
  • The quality of SET will greatly improve if SET is seen as a process with linked, coherent stages, and when it forms a closed loop. One ‘actor’ should be appointed as accountable for the whole process.

The findings of the research as well as full project report are noted in the recent project report.

See more EQUAL supported projects here and do not hesitate to contact us regarding suggestions of important topics or questions related to quality and business education.

Project: Entrepreneurship Education in Business Schools – France

The Entrepreneurship Education in Business Schools: Best practices and recommendations project aims to address the gap between the growing number of entrepreneurship initiatives in Business Schools in Europe and the lack of guidance on how to support this type of education. In addition, it attempts to promote processes of creative research and innovation that must be the base of the future of business education. Among others, the main goal of this project is to provide guidelines for business schools on improving entrepreneurship education.

The first phase of the project, led by Chartered ABS and Asociación Española de Escuelas de Dirección de Empresa (AEEDE), covered literature review, the methodology of the research, and focused on Spain. The second phase is now presenting the research on French Business Schools, which was led by Chapitre des Écoles de Management of Cenferénce des Grandes Écoles (CGE). It looks into the practices and methods of the Entrepreneurship education in three business schools in France: South Champagne Business School (SCBS), EDC de Paris, and Toulouse Business School (TBS). The methodology is based on a qualitative approach, including secondary data collection and qualitative interviews with entrepreneurship managers from the Business Schools.

The findings of the research as well as recommendations for entrepreneurship education are noted in the recent project report.

To better understand the entrepreneurship education practices in Europe, currently, the third part of the project addressing Business Schools in Italy is ongoing under the lead of Associazione Italiana per la Formazione Manageriale (ASFOR).

See more EQUAL supported projects here and do not hesitate to contact us regarding suggestions of important topics or questions related to quality and business education.

Project: Management and Leadership Development Needs in Dynamic Societies

A recent CEEMAN-led project, Management and Leadership Development Needs in Dynamic Societies, which was supported by EQUAL, aimed to enhance the collaborative approach between education and business sector. The research focused on one of Business Schools’ stakeholders: the business sector and its needs in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The societal, political and economic changes in Central and Eastern Europe and South Africa in the past 25 years led to numerous business challenges for companies in the region. CEEMAN has recently concluded an exploratory study on the major current and future summons, which conducted by Danica Purg, Alenka Braček Lalić and Jennifer Pope. The authors address the following challenges: demographic trends and political instability, the fourth industrial revolution, changing customers’ behaviours and needs and a more competitive environment.

The study analyses the companies’ responses in order to identify the skills gap and consequently formulates recommendations on how management education can help to close that gap.

Findings of the two-year exploratory study were published by Springer in a book titled Business and Society – Making Management Education Relevant for the 21st Century.

The book also contains country chapters to dig deeper into the particular issues and needs in the participating countries. Featuring an extensive research study, it offers a unique perspective on the business challenges and developmental needs of companies in emerging and recently emerged economies, and on the missing links between those needs and management education.

The findings of the research as well as recommendations both for management education and the business sector have been published by Springer. For more information, please refer to CEEMAN.

See more EQUAL supported projects here and do not hesitate to contact us regarding suggestions of important topics or questions related to quality and business education.

Join the 2018 Management Week in Paris from 22-25 May & celebrate the 50th anniversary of FNEGE

The 4 day event organized by FNEGE in collaboration with the Scientific Management Associations, aims to bring together the entire management community and to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Foundation, created in May 1968.

Academic and professional conferences and debates will be held throughout the week, as well as meetings (Pépite France, IAE France, CGE, Directors of establishment), and the FNEGE day on Thursday 24 May with a Gala Dinner and presentation of the FNEGE awards.

EQUAL celebrates its 20th anniversary!

Video-statement by Professor Eric Waarts, EQUAL vice-chair

EQUAL: Quality always wins – 20 years of Impact on Improving the Quality of Education

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