Learning About Knowing, Knowing About Learning: Management Education on a Part‐time MBA

Abstract

Summary Much recent research on how students learn has been devoted to the contrast between ‘deep’ and ‘surface’ learning. Various writers have refined these concepts and suggested strategies for fostering deep learning throughout the educational system. Others have demonstrated, and lamented, the prevalence of surface learning. This paper explains how the part‐time MBA programme offered by the University of Essex facilitates deep learning by its students. Learning takes place through the papers produced by the students concerning issues and problems in their own organizations. Thus, students largely control the content of their learning, and the degree of their knowledge through their choice of subject. What they learn and what they know is self‐selected and unique to each of them. One can, perhaps, draw many parallels between the MBA course and the teaching of a Zen master... One of the central themes of Zen Buddhism is the impossibility of teaching enlightenment: the master, instead, having to guide th...