Globalization Creates New Challenges in Higher Education - Two New Educational Activities Addressing the Challenges

Abstract

This chapter explores how educational institutions are faced with changes in the modern global business environment, and how this leads to a need for changes in curricula for universities in general and for business schools and information systems (IS) schools in particular. Most of academia still uses a strict disciplinary model of education resulting in a high degree of specialization within each discipline, while modern business environments require knowledge workers who can address problems that cut across disciplines on an increasingly global scale. Both researchers and governments observing this trend have called for a change in higher education over the last decade. Although suggestions vary for what such a change should encompass, all agree that there is a need to increase the focus on the following three topics: (1) globalization, (2) collaborative skills and (3) information literacy. How to incorporate these topics into curricula has been a subject of debate and this is still an open question, but it is clear that especially topics 2) and 3) need to be based on students’ experience and training instead of typical classroom lectures. We take a practical approach by introducing two new multinational educational activities to develop skills related to the three topics of globalization, collaborative skills and information literacy. Activity 1 is global supply chain management using an ERP system and Activity 2 is a Virtual Team Role Play using virtual world software. Results from several pilot studies using these techniques in two universities in Norway and Australia are discussed.