using e-collaboration to improve management education: three scenarios.

This paper explores the potential impact of collaborative technologies in improving managementeducation. The first goal is to expose students to tools and practices that not only assist themwith their current studies, but also serve to reinforce individual and team competencies that canfacilitate their entry into the workforce. In their positions as future managers they will beexpected to not only be familiar with common business practices but also to understand theimplications of information technology for business; in this case with emphasis on tools andtechniques that can help businesses flourish in the networked economy. With an ever-increasingrecognition that e-learning tools are important for (re-)training employees, these three scenariosoffer examples of how business schools might expand the boundaries of e-collaboration to helptheir students. These experiments have been conducted in management programs. In the first twoscenarios, students use collaborative platforms in some of their daily work. The third experimentis based on a student-centred design of a learning portal. Our experience reinforces a certainnumber of hypotheses influencing the impact of collaborative technologies in managementeducation. To begin with, information systems are often flawed mirrors of the managerial systemthat they are designed to represent. Secondly, the potential value of collaborative technologies isstrongly influenced by organizational contexts, both in and between the university and thebusiness community. Thirdly, the effectiveness of collaborative technologies depends to a largedegree upon the depth and coherence of learning objectives fixed for learning and work places.Finally, improving the effectiveness of collaborative technologies requires aligning the design oflearning environments with the corporate cultures and visions we are trying to reproduce.