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.

It is interesting to contrast ExecOnline’s challenges with our own. At ExecOnline, corporate “participants” (not “students”) took 3- or 6-week online courses built around lecture videos delivered by marquee management experts, and live webinars, and, not least, a meaningful assignment.

That assignment was to identify, with our help, a real problem in their own organization and to 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.

But ExecOnline and Scalable Learning share the focus on engagement, learner empathy, and impact. So it was not surprising to us that 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.”

Higher education needs to provide new kinds of learning experiences like this.