By Meagan Troop

Introduction

This work has been co-created with multiple constituents as part of The Pilon School of Business’s (PSB) Transforming Business Education initiative at Sheridan College, which is located in the Greater Toronto area in Ontario, Canada. The college has three campuses, each with their own distinguishing areas of focus. The Honours Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) program is one of the programs offered in PSB and will serve as the case study in this Open Educational Resource (OER). The BBA program is based out of the Hazel McCallion Campus (HMC) in Mississauga, Ontario.

The HMC campus resides on the traditional lands of several Indigenous nations, including the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Wendat, the Métis, and the Mississaugas  of the Credit First Nation. In PSB, we acknowledge that it is both our individual and collective responsibility to honour and respect those who have gone before us, those who are here, and those who have yet to come. We are grateful for the opportunity to be working and living on this land, and to be learning with and from one another.

As a community of teaching and learning, we are aware that we need to equip graduates for the demanding and ever-shifting business environment they will encounter. Our shared reflections and resources, stories, and exemplars have been compiled and curated as a living snapshot of some of the transformative-focused processes and outcomes in the Pilon School of Business (PSB). These exemplars have been gathered largely within a Community of Practice (CoP) of educators that has been ongoing in PSB since Winter 2022. As educators in the CoP, one of our primary drivers is to address current and future expectations of business professionals and hone graduates’ ability to continually adapt and thrive in their professional careers. In opening this conversation and exchange with a broader educational community, we invite you to engage with what is being shared in a spirit of generosity and collegial exchange.

This Open Educational Resource (OER) is laid out in the following manner:

Our PSB Teaching and Learning Community

PSB is a learning and teaching community with a strong ethic of care, focused on building and nurturing strong relationships, oriented towards co-creating with our learners. We are steadfast in our commitment to offering accessible, inclusive, and engaging experiences. We believe these qualities and strengths set us apart.

In the spirit of continuous enhancement and reflective praxis, we often ask ourselves questions like, what unique and signature educational experiences do current business learners need, want, and seek out? And how might we prepare our learners with the discipline-specific and professional competencies required to be responsive and to thrive in the contemporary workplace and in becoming meaningful contributing members of society? What do equitable and inclusive practices look like and feel like for both educators and learners? What barriers and/or constraints exist in reaching some of these outcomes and intended goals? How might we create sustainable structures and processes to support these educational goals?

There are many more questions to be asked and explored—these simply set the tone for the flavour of some that we’ve explored and continue to (re)consider.

Contemporary Business Education 

The complexity of the landscape in which the business professional operates is increasing at an accelerating rate and is showing no signs of slowing down (Halkias, D., Neubert, M., Thurman, P. W., Adendorff, C., & Abadir, S., 2021; Kotter, 2012; Longmore, A-L., Grant., G., & Golnaraghi, G., 2018). With the continued demands for increasing productivity and profit, the ease of competitor entry to the market with increasing globalization and the maturation of the web, as well as the current integration of Environmental Social Governance (ESG) and Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) initiatives into the business landscape, many enterprises are revising their value propositions and redesigning their businesses to maintain and grow their margins and market share.

We are amid an Industrial Revolution 4.0, that according to Halkias et al. (2021), “will no doubt change the way humankind lives, works, and relates to one another” (p. 7). In the context of post-secondary education, we have undoubtedly experienced significant changes during the pandemic (and continue to do so) in terms of the ways in which we learn with and from one another. In the current liminal space within our post-pandemic society where the only constant is change, multiple signals point to the potential for transformation. With potential transformation in mind, both incremental and dramatic in nature, Halkias et al. (2021) poses this critical, thought-provoking question, “Will business schools be the disrupter or the disrupted?” (p. 3).

Signature Teaching and Learning Experiences

One of the ways that PSB is currently disrupting the status quo at Sheridan is through intentional involvement with partnerships and collaborations in and across the institution. More specifically, PSB educators, learners, and administrators alike are actively participating and contributing to the development of several educational initiatives—educational initiatives that intersect and align with our PSB Transforming Business Education initiative. In fact, PSB has taken a leading role in facilitating the conceptualization, design, and implementation of these enhanced learning experiences through our engagement and participation at micro, meso, and macro levels of the institution (Kenny, Watson, & Desmarais, 2016). For example, PSB faculty have recently been involved in designing and teaching Collaborative Online Learning Initiatives (COIL) and in leading facilitated conversations in the Sheridan Artificial Intelligence Symposia.

These signature Sheridan educational experiences in the context of PSB offerings, connect and extend to the development of learner competencies with a holistic approach, as we prepare graduates for the many possible futures that will inevitably involve “demographic and social changes, resource scarcity, inequalities, volatility, complexity and scale and enterprising dynamics” (Halkias, 2021, p. 6).

On a hybrid-hyflex continuum, it will be essential that we continue to lead in PSB with a transformative focused educational strategy that offers a radical reconceptualization of blended, flexible and personalized learning, guided by principles of choice, equivalency, reusability, adaptability, and human-centered design (Beatty, 2007; Darby, 2019). Our PSB educational transformation is and will continue to be informed by societal and educational trends that have emerged, such as advancements in learning analytics, big data, and data analysis, the incorporation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the potential role that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will play in the competencies and skills that our graduates of the future will require, the internationalization and globalization of curriculum and programming, supported and realized through strategic partnerships and exchanges, as well as the demand for entrepreneurial and interdisciplinary mindsets and ways of being essential to tackling the wicked problems of our modern world.

Individuals shaping and navigating businesses into the future, such as PSB’s graduates, need an educational foundation that provides the means to succeed in this challenging future business environment and within our complex world at large. To address this need, we are currently engaged in a process of visioning possible futures for business education with megatrends of 2030 and guided by signals from both research and industry (Halkias et al., 2021; Tse & Esposito, 2017). This process also involves connecting in rich conversation and activity with multiple constituents—both internal and external to Sheridan—including students, faculty, staff, administration, employers, and partners to gain insights from their experiences of business education.

“Business Sense” Framework

The visioning of possible futures in PSB has culminated in our “Business Sense” framework, which connects transformative learning to core competencies, their associated attributes, and ways of becoming for our Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) graduates. Inspired by and aligned with Sheridan’s strategic plan and the PSB academic plan, and multiple interested and affected parties, our Business Sense framework provides faculty and learners alike with a shared language for mobilizing transformative learning in practice. There are multiple ways of integrating the Business Sense framework with consideration for contextual and situational factors, such as modality, subject matter, teaching methods, student needs, preferences, and interests, to name a few.

Our PSB transformative learning initiative serves as a call-to-action to participate in and contribute to a movement of change rather than simply reacting to it. We encourage our PSB community of educators to consider the importance of anticipating possible futures, and to reflect on the value of engagement and experimentation in the development of innovative curriculum, teaching, and learning approaches. Both individually and collectively, as part of this initiative, there have been and will continue to be multiple and diverse opportunities to share insights and experiences in reimagining the narrative(s) of future business education (Halkias et al., 2021).