Online and Blended Business Education for the 21st Century: Current Research and Future Directions

Online and Blended Business Education for the 21st Century

Current research and future directions

J.B. Arbaugh

Table of Contents

Cover image

Title page

Copyright

About the author

Preface

Chapter 1: Overview of online business and management education

Introduction

Why a book on online business education?

Under-reporting and integration of current research

Disciplinary differences and their influences on business education

Disciplinary influences on online business education

Overview of the rest of the book

Chapter 2: Multi-disciplinary and program-level research in online business education

Introduction

Conceptual models and best practices

Multi-course and cross-disciplinary studies

Participant characteristics and behaviors

Influences of technology

Disciplinary effects and online learning outcomes

Classroom comparison studies

Program-level studies in online business education

Conclusion

Chapter 3: The ‘soft/non-life’ discipline: information systems research in online teaching and learning

Introduction

Information systems-grounded conceptual frameworks

Studies of technology and its uses

Online/blended/classroom comparison studies

Participant characteristics, attitudes, perceptions and behaviors

Early applications of Web 2.0 technologies

Conclusion

Chapter 4: The ‘soft/life’ disciplines: management and marketing in online business education

Introduction

Online teaching and learning in the management discipline

Online teaching and learning in the marketing discipline

Conclusions from research in the management and marketing disciplines

Chapter 5: The ‘hard’ business disciplines: accounting, operations, economics, finance and research in online teaching and learning

Introduction

Research in accounting education

Research in operations/supply-chain management education

Research in economics education

Research in finance education

Why is there not more research on online and blended teaching and learning in the ‘hard’ business disciplines, and why is this a problem?

Conclusion

Chapter 6: Where should we go from here?

Introduction

Suggestions for online and blended business instructors

Suggestions for deans, program directors and other business school administrators

Suggestions for online and blended business education researchers

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Copyright

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First published in 2010

ISBN:

978 1 84334 603 6

© J. B. Arbaugh, 2010

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About the author

J. B. (Ben) Arbaugh is Professor of Strategy and Project Management at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. He graduated from Marshall University with a bachelor’s degree in business administration, and with an MBA from Wright State University. He received his PhD in business strategy from the Ohio State University. He joined the faculty of UW Oshkosh in 1994, and teaches graduate-level courses on topics such as strategy, project management, professional development, and ethics. He has been teaching MBA courses online since 1997 and won the UW Oshkosh College of Business Outstanding Graduate Faculty Award in 2008.

Ben is currently the Editor of Academy of Management Learning and Education. He was the 2009 GMAC Management Education Research Institute Faculty Research Fellow, and a past chair of the Academy of Management’s Management Education and Development Division. Ben’s online teaching research has won best article awards from the Journal of Management Education and the Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, and numerous conference best paper awards. His other research interests are in graduate management education and the intersection between spirituality and strategic management research. Ben also sits on the editorial boards of numerous journals, including the International Journal of Management Reviews, the Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, the Journal of Management Education, Management Learning, The Internet and Higher Education, and the Journal of Management, Spirituality, and Religion.

The author may be contacted at:

College of Business

University of Wisconsin Oshkosh

800 Algoma Blvd.

Oshkosh

WI 54901

USA

Tel: + 1 920 424 7189

E-mail: arbaugh@uwosh.edu

Preface

The increasing commonality with which higher education is being delivered at least partially online is hardly newsworthy. As professional schools seeking to respond to students who find themselves increasingly time and location-challenged to manage work and family commitments, it is also hardly surprising that business schools would be at the leading edge of delivering such courses and programs. What may be surprising, however, is the relative lack of resources for online learning that focus specifically on the challenges business schools face in the design and delivery of online and blended programs.

When a business school’s leaders and faculty consider the development, design and delivery of an online or blended degree program, one might expect that considering an integrated curriculum of well-designed courses that capture the intricacies of the differences and the interdependencies between business disciplines in a technologically sound manner would be an excellent starting point. Unfortunately, considering the present state of both the online education and business education literatures, using them to guide the construction of such programs leaves prospective directors and faculty to integrate these perspectives for themselves, if they bother to do so at all. To date, the examination of contributions from online business education scholars has received limited attention from education researchers (Bernard et al., 2004, 2009; Larreamendy-Joerns and Leinhardt, 2006; Tallent-Runnels et al., 2006). This lack of attention is due in part to a tendency of the researchers of online and blended business education to rely upon literature from their own respective disciplines. Operating in a relative vacuum, these scholars generally do not publish work outside of the journals their respective disciplines deem to be appropriate outlets. This book seeks to bridge this divide for the benefit of scholars, administrators, educators, and, ultimately, the students of our programs and those that support them.

This book is written primarily for business school scholars, educators and administrators interested in online and blended learning. The book’s orientation is toward those who have at least some familiarity with teaching online or directing online programs, but are not necessarily familiar with the current body of research. As such, the book does not address general issues of online and blended learning theory and practice, particularly as there are several recent publications that address those topics well, such as books by Anderson (2008), Bonk and Graham (2006), Cleveland-Innes and Garrison (2010), Picciano and Dziuban (2007) and Rovai (2009). However, given its comprehensive coverage of the research literature within and across each of the business disciplines, we also expect that the book may be particularly helpful for business education researchers seeking to more strongly ground and position their work upon contributions from earlier scholars. By highlighting the conceptual and methodological contributions of these scholars, the book also may help advance the development of more rigorous research from the broader online teaching and learning research community.

To address these research and curricular design concerns, we examine the research of online and blended learning in the business disciplines with the intent of providing comprehensive reviews of each discipline, raising awareness of particularly noteworthy studies, and identifying implications for current practice and opportunities to strengthen the collective body of educational research within the business disciplines. We review research from the disciplines of accounting, economics, finance, information systems (IS), management, marketing and operations/supply-chain management. Based upon a framework developed from the literature on epistemological and behavioral differences between academic disciplines, the book is organized into six chapters:

 Chapter 1 presents the rationale for the book, a framework for organizing the business disciplines based upon the disciplinary differences literature, and potential implications of the framework for the design and study of online and blended learning within those disciplines.

 Chapter 2 reviews the literature of cross/multi-disciplinary studies of online and blended business education. It presents the major conceptual foundations and highlights the research findings and methodological contributions of key studies, including the relative importance of participant interaction in predicting course outcomes and the use of more advanced statistical tools.

 Chapter 3 reviews the literature of the ‘bridge’ discipline of this book’s framework – information systems. With this discipline’s interest in uses of technology, it is not surprising that it has the most developed literature base among the business disciplines. Areas of focus for the chapter include discipline-specific conceptual development, results of classroom-based comparative studies, and initial accounts of studies of ‘Web 2.0’ technologies.

 Chapter 4 reviews the literature from the business school’s ‘soft’ disciplines – management and marketing.

 Chapter 5 reviews the literature to date from the business school’s ‘hard’ disciplines – finance, accounting, economics and operations/supply-chain management. Although the literatures of these disciplines are not as developed as those covered in previous chapters, their strong focus on technological tools and content provides support for the design framework presented in the first chapter, and provides some possible explanations for why comparative studies in these disciplines have not supported online learning more strongly.

 Chapter 6 provides sets of recommendations for educators, administrators and researchers interested in online and blended learning in business schools, including ways by which these communities can be mutually supportive. The chapter concludes with a call for greater numbers of ‘scholarly teachers’ to enter this area of educational inquiry to raise the quality of both research and practice.

1

Overview of online business and management education

Introduction

This chapter explores the reasons for a book on online and blended teaching and learning specific to business education. In the paragraphs to follow, we articulate the primary reasons for the book and make a case for why these issues are important. We discuss the relative lack of coverage of research in the business disciplines in mainstream online teaching and learning journals and the lack of work that comprehensively examines the business school curriculum, and articulates the potential problems that this lack of attention may create for business schools interested in online learning going forward. We also examine both epistemological and practical reasons for which disciplinary differences between components of the business school curriculum matter in online and blended delivery, and why generic approaches to online course design may yield adverse impacts for the multi-disciplinary business curriculum. The chapter concludes with an overview of the subsequent chapters.

Why a book on online business education?

This book has been written primarily for three reasons: (1) to develop a framework of online and/or blended learning that is specific to the environment of schools of business; (2) to provide a comprehensive review of the academic literature published to date on this phenomenon specific to the various business disciplines; and (3) to use this framework and review to provide counsel for the future efforts of educators, administrators and researchers residing in business schools that are seeking to understand and apply these educational technologies to better serve their students.

Under-reporting and integration of current research

One does not have venture far into the literature on higher education to see that the delivery of education via the internet is increasing dramatically. For example, in the USA alone, approximately 4.6 million college students took at least one online course during fall 2008, a 17 per cent increase over the year before, which had increased by 12 per cent the year before that (Allen and Seaman, 2010). Consistent with these broader trends in higher education, online and blended delivery of education via the internet have taken on increasing importance for business schools during the last decade (Ozdemir et al., 2008; Popovich and Neel, 2005). However, although this increasing importance has attracted a substantial increase in the volume of published research on the uses of online and blended learning in business schools, much of this research has had relatively isolated impacts on subsequent research and practice. Although meta-analyses have reported that courses in business delivered via distance education fare comparatively well versus their classroom-based counterparts (Sitzmann et al., 2006; Zhao et al., 2005), recent literature reviews of online learning published in the highly regarded Review of Educational Research have tended to ignore work originating from the business disciplines (Bernard et al., 2004, 2009; Larreamendy-Joerns and Leinhardt, 2006; Tallent-Runnels et al., 2006), in part because many studies of online and blended business education have not employed experimental research designs with random assignment of subjects to frame their studies. The exclusion of such studies from broader literature reviews may however penalize business education researchers for factors beyond their control. Because online and blended business education scholars typically examine actual online courses, where administrators and students control the composition of the research samples, experimental designs that yield samples of sufficient statistical power are not usually feasible. This unique field characteristic requires business education researchers to incorporate research designs that provide the advantages of randomized experiments as much as possible but without compromising student access or program/course offerings. These researchers have therefore tended to rely upon quasi-experimental designs and field surveys of courses in their respective areas of expertise. Although perhaps not ‘perfect’ in an experimental sense, these studies can provide useful information for those participants in business schools interested in delivering their programs through online and/or blended learning and improving their current level of practice. It therefore seems prudent to develop a means by which this collective research can be disseminated.

In response to this relative lack of consideration of online and blended business education research by the broader online learning research community, business education scholars have begun to disseminate these findings more actively. One such effort was a recent article reviewing research by business discipline by Arbaugh et al. (2009). This chronicle of work from the first decade of the twenty-first century found that although the volume and quality of research in online and blended business education increased dramatically, the rate of progress across the disciplines was rather uneven. Disciplines such as information systems and management had relatively active research communities, but disciplines such as finance and economics had little to no research. The authors also found that the reason why business school researchers did not receive broader attention in the online learning research literature was at least partially self-inflicted. Scholars of online and blended business education appear to publish predominantly in the learning and education journals of their respective business disciplines rather than also publishing in journals that focus on online teaching