Abstract:

There has been a consistent theme of personalized education over many years demonstrated in Acadia University’s School of Business. In 2006 the University adopted a strategic plan that placed personalized education as a pillar of the University’s mandate. Over the last three years the Fred C. Manning School of Business has implemented a number of initiatives aimed to respond the student preferences in the context of scholarly pursuits. This has been demonstrated by an approach that places the student as an essential partner in the discovery, learning and application of knowledge. Further explicit efforts have been made to connect business undergraduate students to business alumni and the business community. The Business School draws students into close learning relationships with faculty members and professional staff. Further it supports them in acquiring, creating, or applying knowledge, and engages them with the world around them. Acadia’s small size and character as a small liberal education university with small disciplinary units supports interdisciplinary or cross disciplinary program. Using an interest driven framework for programme delivery the School of Business provides opportunities for students to take courses in traditional business areas such as accounting, marketing, finance and management yet draw on individual expertise areas of faculty and long-term relationships and networks with leading businesses and institutions to tailor curricula to the individual student interests. Specific strategies include building on a long history of technology integration, the School utilizes technology to enhance the connections between students and business leaders through the use of video and web technology to produce cases for both educational and research purposes in new media beyond the conventional medium of hard print copy in which business cases have traditionally appeared. The Management Video Data Base Project and the Business Studies CIC Learning Technologies Centre are assisting with this goal. A second innovation has been to develop a virtual corporation with a 3D headquarters on the Second Life platform. This 3D building definitely plants AxeCorp in the imagination as a real place. It will be used for virtual meetings, as a site to collaborate with other universities, and to house and showcase student achievement. The use of a co-curricular transcript enhances the development of a programme that connects the student to the community in meaningful ways. The proposed presentation will discuss the challenges and opportunities of using personalized education as a pedagogical and curricular framework for business education in a small liberal education university in Canada.