Page 34 - Campus Technology, March/April 2019

2018
Creating an Immersive, Global Experience for
Business Education
The University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School is using cutting-edge videoconferencing technology to connect students and academic scholars in a truly global classroom.
By Meg Lloyd
Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford (England) is consistently recog- nized for its top-rated programs, as one of a handful of influential business education and research centers worldwide, where scholars and students confront significant global chal- lenges at scale.
But as recently as early 2017, faculty and administrators were facing a growing irony: While their premier business school was work- ing arduously on the world’s problems, they were delivering teaching and learning in an on- campus-only mode. The school’s programs were offered solely face-to-face, so in effect, much of the work on the important issues they tackled was limited to onsite conversations — just as it
had always been throughout the university’s 800-plus-year history. The remarkable tradition of a time-honored, campus-based Oxford expe- rience aside, the business school was in some sense falling behind because it was not using digital technologies to generate the kind of instant and inclusive interactions necessary to create a global community in today’s world.
So, this past year, the school resolved to transform curricula and invest in cutting-edge technologies to support online and digital learning. In less than one calendar year, these efforts at Oxford Saïd would produce an excep- tional model for immersive learning and enable a truly global community of scholarship that could collaborate on complex problems virtually
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | March/April 2019
Photo: University of Oxford