The role of ICT in business ethics courses: Evident from Bangladesh

Abstract

Business education is one of the growing phenomena both in the developed and developing world. Global argument in many contexts from the areas that are more connected to profit and loss (that is marketing, accounting, finance and management) activities of business have been heavily given emphasis recently. As a result, motivation of academics in teaching and students’ motivation in learning the course has recently maintained a low profile. However, a well established argument is that without adopting updated business ethics course as a fundamental of business education, neither long term business goal can be achieved nor a decent national development can be ensured. After the invention of ICT, most of the courses are trying to have a maximum benefit through the usage of IT. It is thus important to have a greater role of ICT in business ethics course. Based on the experience of courses taught by the author, this paper argues that an adequate use of ICT in the teaching of a business ethics (BE) course depends on clarifying the assumptions about ethics and the place of the course within a programme. For this purpose, it explains how ICT can be used to strengthen a view of business ethics based on dialogue and mutual learning and it encourages the combination between virtual and face-to-face teaching. Data used for this paper are the teaching and observation experiences in two universities in Bangladesh. One of them is public, while the other is included from a private counterpart. Finally, the paper examines the relationship between the use of ICT, individual learning processes and communities of practice. Key words: Business education, business ethics, corporate citizenship, ICT, learning processes.