By: Sena Agbodjah and Esther Laryea
The Motivation
Nothing could have prepared the world for the seismic shock of the COVID-19 pandemic which left a profound mark on the globe as institutions scrambled to rethink business-as-usual. The effect crippled some institutions and left others in permanent disarray, while others managed to adapt swiftly. The core of managing the pandemic was the need for quick adaptations or extinction. The educational sector was not spared. Most educational institutions globally shut down for a period ranging from a couple of weeks up to a semester in their bid to adjust to the new status quo. The need for institutions to strategise, infrastructure to be built, and faculty members to be trained on new technologies, were but a few of the actions and allied actions educational institutions had to undertake to get back on track. Institutions in sub-Saharan Africa had to adjust, with some having documented their experience as Ashesi University did here.
African business schools and departments, like most global business schools, have relied heavily on face-to-face teaching and had to make some adjustments while maintaining the networking and industry engagement component of their offerings. The Ashesi Business Administration Department (referred to as “the department”) did its share of modifications including leveraging technology to go global with class and industry guests, developing industry visit videos to provide students with the field trip experience from the comforts of their homes, developing the concept of proxy users to support entrepreneurship education where stakeholder engagement is concerned, among others. Additionally, faculty members could join the teaching team from universities across the globe. The department leveraged this opportunity to introduce new elective courses, expose students to global business trends, pilot cross-continental co-teaching and knowledge sharing among faculty members, and develop relationships that post-COVID, would help the department enhance teaching, learning, and the overall student and faculty member experience.
Though the department had put in place measures and was leveraging the opportunities of the time while managing the challenges that it exposed teaching, learning, and research to, the leadership wondered how other business schools on the continent were doing and how the team could learn from and share with sister institutions across the continent. This was in a bid to promote business education even in those turbulent times. Leveraging the Education Collaborative’s annual convening platform, the department hosted a round table discussion on how business schools present at the virtual convening had manoeuvred the pandemic era, what we could learn from each other, and what collaborations we could form to guarantee enhanced teaching and learning during and after the pandemic. The goal of the conversation was to learn how the pandemic has reshaped business education, with a focus on enhancing the positives and learning from the challenges.
The Roundtable Conversation: A 2021 Perspective
At the virtual convening of the Education Collaborative in 2021, the department hosted close to 30 faculty members and administrators from about 12 institutions’ business schools/ departments across sub-Saharan Africa in a conversation focused on the shifts in teaching and learning within business schools and departments across sub-Saharan African higher educational institutions during the pandemic. The aim was to explore the repercussions of the pandemic on their business schools/ departments and chart a collective course for adapting practices for resilient business education across the sub-Saharan regions of Africa through collective sharing. The hosts hoped that participants, and institutions at large, through this conversation, will learn from each other where tools they can explore and adapt to navigate future scenarios characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, like what the pandemic presented were concerned.
The conversation was structured around three fundamental inquiries aimed at yielding valuable insights about how the pandemic has transformed business education and how this will impact the future of work along with the preparedness of graduates for this work environment, captured in the paragraphs below.
Inquiry 1: How the pandemic has impacted teaching and learning in sub-Saharan African Business Schools
The discussion unveiled several ways in which the pandemic had impacted teaching and learning in business schools across sub-Saharan Africa. The challenge of effectively engaging students virtually came out strongly. This was attributed to several students dealing with the profound repercussions of the pandemic, including experiences of loss, having to attend to family while at home, having shorter online attention spans than the regular 90-minute durations of most classes, and generally not being familiar with online learning. Faculty members also encountered difficulty in designing suitable learning modules which were e-learning friendly partly due to the lack of e-learning instructional technological expertise to ensure that the modules were fit for purpose. There was a general concern about the lack of infrastructure and access by some students and faculty members alike.
Recognizing the importance of adapting to online teaching, however, some institutions had their faculty members undergo professional development to effectively teach in a virtual environment while developing instructional technological expertise through global partnerships. Concerning designing learning modules, institutions organized teaching programs on various online platforms to collaboratively devise strategies for improving the overall learning experience for students, to augment efforts being made by their institutions. Conversations were had, and materials were shared on how faculty members could support the mental health of learners and empathise with their situations to ensure that value was not lost in delivery and learning. None of the institutions present was intentional about supporting the mental and emotional well-being of faculty members, most of whom were working twice as much to guarantee success in class, while balancing this with domestic responsibilities, with some having to home-school their children.
Inquiry 2: Impact of Pandemic on the Nature of the Future of Work Business Schools Are Training For
Since the pandemic, the employment landscape has undergone profound transformations with job requirements and relevant skills evolving at a pace unprecedented in recent decades. According to the 2023 World Economic Forum Report, a staggering 44% of workers are expected to witness disruptions in their skill sets over the next five years. Forecasts indicate that approximately 26 million jobs in routine tasks such as data entry, accounting, administrative roles, and secretarial positions are at risk of being phased out. Simultaneously, there is a notable surge in demand for roles centred around technology, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) specialists, business, and information security analysts, as well as renewable energy engineers. The report further highlights a crucial need for upskilling in response to these changes as this shift emphasizes a growing demand for cognitive abilities and problem-solving skills. As traditional roles diminish, individuals must adapt and acquire new proficiencies to meet the demands of emerging job opportunities. This underscores the importance of continuous learning and professional development to navigate the dynamic landscape of the evolving workforce successfully.
The contributors in the conversation spoke to how the pandemic had allowed stakeholders to experience an aspect of the future of work, which would mean more global work, more use of technology, and a heavy reliance on soft skills including problem-solving skills, critical thinking skills, and more cognitive capabilities. There was a mix of concerns and hopes. Contributors spoke of how they are experiencing these trends themselves, hence could empathise with students more. Some spoke of how this experience has had them rethink their entire pedagogy to make it less theoretical and more experiential in ways that appeal to students. Others spoke of the opportunity to co-design the learning environment with the students and employers globally, and how they can bring in the employers even more intentionally. Some went on to share how they have themselves been exposed to “tools of the future” and have been forced to learn these, such that they can understand how to make their courses even more relevant.
Beyond the technicalities, trends like remote work and the increase in demand for technological and problem-solving competencies were seen as possible ways of enhancing productivity in the workplace, as it was done in the classroom. These they mentioned could promote work-life balance if properly managed. Some spoke of how this requires that individual students are trained to be very efficient managers of their time as their inability to do so will flip this work-life balance over and have them being overworked as they could end up working for even longer hours. Some of the respondents mentioned how their productivity has tripled or doubled in some cases, and how they feel a lot of stress. Administrators spoke about how there was very little time between meeting transition times, and their days tended to be heavily packed, requiring that they be very intentional about blocking off time to work, as failing to do so meant they would end up spending most of their evening and sometimes dawn, to get work done. The administrators also spoke about how their research work has been negatively affected as they were having less time to focus on research. These they mentioned are real challenges that could plague the future workspace, hence the need for students to be trained in time management in ways that will aid them in managing their work-life balance even better.
Inquiry 3: Preparing Graduates for this Future of Work
The conversation finally moved into how business schools can leverage the lessons they have learned from the pandemic, their views of what the future of work looks like, and how these can be leveraged in preparing their students to become graduates who are ready for the world of work.
It was shared that, it was imperative for upskilling to become even more apparent, as individuals seek to not only adapt to the changing work environment but also leverage opportunities this presents by evolving work models. Conversations were had about how the future work environment of the higher education space could look with respondents spread across a continuum with a reverse to how things were pre-pandemic while learning from the effect, on the one end, and a total overhaul on the other end. There were conversations about how institutions could adopt different forms of e-learning: blended versus online learning. Some respondents were looking to a future where all courses were available online as a way of expanding enrolment while creating even more access to higher education. Others were also caught up in going back in person, as the changes that needed to be made would be overwhelming to design, fund, and implement. There was a smaller group that considered going blended, alluding to the fact that not all content could move online, hence there was the need for intentionality in instructional technologies in course design to decide what aspects of the course could be done in a virtual environment and how, while considering which parts had to be done in person or perhaps using some asynchronous mode, with a focus on learning outcomes.
The conversation underscored the critical need to equip students with advanced digital skills, recognizing the intrinsic importance of aligning educational practices with the evolving demands of the digital landscape. The conversation veered off into how digitisation can be more intentionally introduced into the business school curriculum and classroom. Some of the suggestions bordered on the introduction of courses that focused on how the business world can leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI), how business decisions can be enhanced by ML and data analytics, and equipping students with basics in AI, ML, agile project management, lean technologies, data analytics skills and competencies that they can apply in the world of work. There were also discussions about how existing paper-based courses can be made digital while using industry-standard simulators to aid instruction. Some discussants spoke about how business school faculty members should be connected to industry either as consultants or as interns to pick up these skills in ways that they can transfer to students while staying current. Additionally, they recognized the need for students to seamlessly integrate these digital competencies into their respective business models, irrespective of industry or sectorial distinctions, through cases or experiential enterprise development.
This conversation concluded with two very important considerations. First, the future workplace will require people to adapt quickly to the changing environment and occurrences, changing technological and digital tools, including the need for agile approaches to turn around quickly. Business schools thus need to incorporate agility into their learning outcomes and teach students how to be resilient while being highly adaptable. The second point was the potential reduction in socialisation resulting in increased stress levels. Depending on the industry one finds themselves in, they might not have the benefit of a social structure to support them. The environment could also be very fast-paced and not allow for socialisation and relationship building beyond work tasks and responsibilities. The conversation stressed the need for employers, including higher educational institutions, to be intentional about how they promote a social work environment, and provide opportunities for teams to engage in team-building activities that promote relationship-building and trust.
Moving Forward: what is in store for Business Schools in Sub-Saharan Africa?
From the conversations, it was clear to every higher education faculty member and staff present that there was the need to adapt work in the higher education space first, so we could gain an experience similar to what our graduates would encounter in their workplaces. This would help faculty members to appreciate how teaching and learning should be structured to reach the desired outcomes. Most of the discussants alluded to how traditional their environments are, and how they struggled to transition online. More alarming was how most of the institutions had not documented this pandemic experience to log lessons from the transition processes. Some were very concerned about the future of teaching, learning, and research, and the future transition from the new normal to what it would become. There were successes that we could all celebrate, and a wealth of learnings, but these were more on the individual level. Business schools/ departments must be intentional about the institutionalised adaptations, and documenting these.
There was also the issue of how rapidly the pandemic has catalysed the transition to the next industrial revolution, and how there was the need to maintain collaborations with industry and other research/ economic organisations to keep trendy in our thoughts and approaches. One latent need not discussed is the need to equip students with “remote-working skills” such as independence, collaboration, writing, tech-savviness, resilience, and adaptability, just to mention a few. A conversation that has arisen from the pandemic is professionalism in remote work and the ability to improve communication to collectively achieve goals without having to meet in person. Business schools/departments would thus need to make these explicit learning outcomes that different courses will pick from and bring to their students.
While some educators have observed increased engagement of introverted students in the classroom with online learning, it is worth investigating how this approach might have also fostered a more passive attitude towards learning, and how going blended could enhance learning and the onward achievement of learning outcomes. In addition, some questions remain unanswered. For example, the conveners of the round table are still curious about alternatives to in-person learning beyond what the discussants brought up in the conversations, and how online learning can be enhanced since that was the preference of some of the institutions. There are also general questions about how business schools can be intentional about preparing their graduates for a future of work plagued with so many uncertainties. More important, is how business schools and departments across sub-Saharan Africa can more intentionally collaborate to promote the efficiency and effectiveness of teaching, learning, and research in ways that prepare their graduates, collectively, while addressing the needs of the future workplace.
Acknowledgement
Institutional support from the Business Administration Department, Ashesi University, and the Education Collaborative; Administrative support from Elorm Dela-Brown and Marcellina Kazare; and Research assistantship from Mr Samuel Fordjour, Jil Opoku-Ahene, and Elizabeth Johnson.