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Canwest News Service
Ginny Dybenko can't see Russia from her front porch. But the dean of Wilfrid Laurier University School of Business and Economics in Waterloo, Ont., can see the headquarters of Research In Motion Ltd. from her office window.
And last year when a group of visiting professors from Mexico's Instituto Technologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, a private technology university, told Ms. Dybenko they were giving every one of their 4,400 students a RIM Black-Berry smartphone, her jaw nearly hit the desk.
"It was a bit of a wake-up call," Ms. Dybenko recalls. "I'd been thinking about how we could marry business education with telecommunication, and here we are in the same city that produces BlackBerrys, but this school in Mexico was actually doing it. I figured we'd better get started."
And so this past August, Laurier's MBA program became the first school in Canada to give its students BlackBerrys. Next up, figuring out how to use the smartphones to revolutionize business education. "This is an opportunity to see how far we can take learning beyond the four walls of a classroom," Ms. Dybenko says.
Laurier's program is a collaboration between RIM, which supplied the BlackBerrys, Rogers Wireless, which provides the data plan, and the school itself, which is subsidizing the process so it's free to students. Desire2Learn, a Waterloo-based e-learning firm, has also contributed specialized applications. The 100 full-time MBA students at Laurier are now permanently linked to their professors and each other. Laurier has another 400 part-time MBA students in Waterloo and Toronto not yet hooked up to BlackBerrys. But they soon might be.
"This project has really become a catalyst for us to rethink our entire management education model," says Hugh Munro, Laurier's MBA director. "We want to reflect what is happening in the work place and the reality is it's an always-on, always-connected world out there. So what does that mean for our curriculum and how we deliver our education?"
Prof. Munro's goal is to change business pedagogy using Black-Berrys' ability to push email to users. "Being able to deliver content right into students' hands at any time means I can spend my classroom time doing other things," Mr. Munro says. "Ultimately the professor will no longer need to be a content provider, but will act more as a coach or a mentor. We'll be able to do less lecturing and more guiding."
Laurier's faculty is already creating some BlackBerry-specific course material with voice-overs and graphics, although a full-scale revolution will take time to bear fruit. The smartphones appear to be having a more immediate impact on student-to-student contact.
MBA programs typically require prodigious amount of teamwork. And the BlackBerrys are proving to be major timesaver. "Time is such a scarce resources for us," says Vish Aggarwal, president of the Laurier MBA Student Association.
"Being able to get in touch with your other team members means you aren't wasting time trying to schedule meetings.
"Plus I can do my work and get emails anywhere. The BlackBerrys have been great."
It was this collaborative aspect of an MBA education that first attracted RIM to Laurier's proposal, says Sheldon Hebert, RIM's director of public sector, health and education sales. The business community has long been sold on instant communication, but schools represent virgin territory for RIM.
"As a company, we're reaching deeper into consumer markets," Mr. Hebert says. "So we are very interested in giving students motivation to use a BlackBerry as well as changing the educational experience."
Along with Laurier in Canada, and Monterrey Tech in Mexico, RIM is participating in a similar project at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. Mr. Hebert reports RIM is also looking to establish beachheads in medical schools. The vast amount of imaging and information doctors share makes that profession another obvious and desirable market.
And yet any promise of an education revolution must come with caveats.
Previous pilot programs that focused solely on familiarizing students with BlackBerrys as a business tool have proven disappointing. Most students arrive at university far more connected and knowledgeable about new technology than their professors. Case in point, the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland began a BlackBerry program for its MBAs in 2004 but has since discontinued it.
What is more important is fundamentally changing how students and professors interact and what kind of information they share. If Laurier can figure out how to use Black-Berrys to provide a deeper and more relevant educational experience by keeping everyone connected, then smartphones could become as crucial to universities as they are currently to the business world.
Until then, Mr. Munro says he's still fine-tuning the use of Black-Berrys in the lecture hall. "There are times when it's great to see the students tapping away looking for new information that's relevant to what I'm saying. Then there are other times when I'd really like them to be focusing on me."
