The New Challenge of Educating Future Leaders
By David Foster, Partner, Scalable Learning
We just completed a very successful pilot of a new Coached Case. It is Scalable Learning’s first foray into management education. Though for our founding team, it is hardly our first. All of us previously worked for ExecOnline, a leading provider of leadership development services in the online space.
At ExecOnline, corporate “participants” (not “students”) took 3- or 6-week online courses built around lecture videos by marquee management experts, live webinars, and, not least, a meaningful assignment.
That assignment was to identify, with our help, a real problem in their own organization and apply a structured approach to solving it. In that sense, ExecOnline was partly a refined form of performance support. Higher education has a somewhat different problem. At a moment when universities are under pressure to prove their value, they are still much better at teaching concepts and analysis than at giving students repeated practice in real-time managerial judgment. That is what made our new OB case study, piloted at DePaul University’s Driehaus College of Business, so interesting to us.
The subject matter of our interactive cases is comparable to that of, say, HBS cases. But ours of course are highly interactive, and now LLM-powered to accelerate learning and to make it infinitely more engaging and personalized.
The pilot results were strong. Student ratings on Insight into People-Management, Engagement, and Coaching Effectiveness all came in between 4 and 5, with 4.6 for both Insight and Engagement, and 4.4 for Coaching. Students described the experience as engaging, valuable, and authentic. One wrote: “It didn’t feel like homework it felt like playing an online game.” Another said, “I liked how interactive it was, and I felt like I was actually part of it.”
We are deeply grateful to Professor Marty Martin and to online director James Moore for the chance to pilot this work with Driehaus students, and for their generosity, openness, and collaboration throughout. Marty brought sharp subject-matter guidance and a real appetite for experimentation. James provided expert learning theory and feedback. We came away not just pleased with a pilot, but more convinced that higher education needs new forms of practice like this.
