Should Digital Skills Be Required For A Management Degree?

What About Digital Skills For Management Students?

I have a UBC Management student who is an excellent coder. He picked up his skills on his own, probably as far back as junior high school. But in talking with him now, he says that he hates coding. I told him that was perfectly normal and acceptable. Not everyone is cut out to be hacker. But I did emphasize to him that his experience and skills in the world of software would serve him well in his management career.  It is my firm belief that not enough emphasis is placed on these skills in the Brave New World of management, rapidly morphing into one Big Data, Cloud, and Smart Mobile hairball.  We can argue when, where and by whom it should be taught, but I urge all of my students to consider developing some of these skills, as being important to their management success.

In the attached HBR Blog Network article below, students were polled as to the usefulness of one Harvard basic undergraduate course in computer science. My most important take away from that poll was the response from many students, that while they could not code and were not particularly technical, taking the course improved their confidence in dealing with engineering types, software development issues, the Web, and technical computing matters generally.  I had the great good fortune to begin my career in the early days of Intel, but without any technical training. I thank my lucky stars for the education that Intel provided me. That kind of process is no longer feasible.

Read more: Why knowing how to code is so important

Read more: Integrated Big Data, Cloud, and Smart Mobile: Big Deal or Not?

Reblogged from the HBR Blog Network

Should MBAs Learn to Code?

by Thomas R. Eisenmann  |  11:00 AM September 2, 2013

This post was originally published on the author’s blog. It has been edited slightly.

“Should I learn to code?”

MBAs who lack programming skills often ask this question when they pursue careers in technology companies.

Bloggers like Yipit co-founder Vin Vacanti have shared views on the payoff from learning to code, as have several students at Harvard Business School, including Dana Hork, Matt Boys, and Matt Thurmond.

I thought it’d be helpful to supplement bloggers’ perspectives with some survey data. I received responses from 24 of the 41 HBS students who enrolled over the past two years in CS50, the introductory computer science course at Harvard College.

My survey didn’t ask for comments on the quality of CS50 itself. The course is widely acclaimed; my colleague David Malan has grown its enrollment five-fold to 715 students over the six years he has served as lead instructor. Rather, my goal with the survey was to learn whether MBAs saw this well designed and rigorous course as a good investment of their time, given their career objectives and other course options. The tradeoffs are tricky: survey respondents reported spending an average of 16.3 hours per week on CS50 — perhaps 2-3x more time than they would spend on an MBA elective that yielded equivalent academic credit.

So, was it worth it? Of the 18 survey respondents who founded a startup, joined an existing startup, or went to work for a big tech company upon graduation, 83% answered “yes” to the question, “On reflection, was taking CS50 worth it for you?” and 17% said “not sure.” Of these 18 respondents, none said that taking CS50 was not worth it. By contrast, of the six respondents who pursued jobs outside of the tech sector — say, in consulting or private equity — only two said CS50 was a worthwhile investment; three said it was not; and one was not sure.

Benefits

Respondents cited several benefits from taking CS50.

Writing Software. Respondents differed in their assessments of their current ability to contribute working code on the job, based on their CS50 learning. Several said they regularly do so, for example:

Kyle Watkins, who joined an existing startup, said he has “used CS50 skills to create a half dozen VBA programs that will likely save the startup I’m working for tens of thousands of dollars.”

Michael Belkin, who founded his own startup, said, “After taking CS50, I was able to build an MVP that would have cost at least $40K to outsource. And it was better, because I understood all the small details that drive a user’s experience. After HBS, I became one of the lead developers at my startup, which has saved the company several hundred thousand dollars.”

Communicating with Developers. Other respondents, especially those employed in large tech companies, said they couldn’t really write production software, but felt more confident in their ability to discuss technical issues with developers as a result of taking CS50. For example:

Jon Einkauf, a product manager for Amazon AWS, said, “I work with developers on my team every day to define and build new features. In addition, the users of my product are developers and data scientists. Taking CS50 gave me a glimpse of what it’s like to be a developer — to get excited about complex computer science problems, to get frustrated when you hit a bug. It taught me enough about software development that I don’t feel lost in my current job. I can ask intelligent questions, I can push back on the developers when necessary, and I am confident that I could teach myself anything else I need to learn.”

Luke Langford, who joined Zynga as a product manager upon graduation, said that CS50 “gave me a working knowledge and confidence to be able to review code. Product managers at Zynga don’t often work in code, but there were several times when I was able to diagnose issues and help the engineers identify why certain algorithms that calculated scores were wrong. Pre-CS50, I wouldn’t have been able to do that.”

Recruiting. Several respondents mentioned that their CS50 experience had helped persuade recruiters that they were committed to a career in technology. As one anonymous respondent reported, “I wanted to get a job at a tech startup and ended up as a product manager at one of NYC’s hottest tech startups. The founder, who is a CS PhD, was really impressed that I’d learned to code. I think it made a difference in getting the offer.”

Costs

The benefits from CS50 came at a considerable cost, however, in terms of workload. In addition to lectures and section meetings, the course has weekly problem sets, two mid-terms exams, and a final project that requires students to design and build an application.

Beyond the heavy workload, respondents who were less sanguine about the payoff from CS50 often cited its use of C to teach fundamentals such as functions, loops and arrays, rather than a more modern programming language. While acknowledging that C is well suited for this purpose, these students would have preferred more focus on languages used in web development (e.g., JavaScript, HTML, and PHP), which are covered in the last one-third of CS50’s syllabus. Likewise, some students said they understood why certain “academic” concepts (e.g., algorithm run times, security) were covered in an introductory CS course, but they did not view such concepts as salient to their “just learn to code” personal priorities.

Many respondents acknowledged that there are online options for learning to code that would not require as big a time commitment as CS50. However, they saw a graded course for academic credit as good way to ensure they would actually get the work done. An anonymous respondent said, “I knew that I would never learn programming if I didn’t have something — a problem set or test — to keep me accountable every week. I don’t want to generalize, but I highly doubt that most HBS people after doing their cases/travel/socializing are going to set aside time to consistently do Codecademy or Treehouse every week.”

Justin Ekins added, “You can learn everything in this course online, but, let’s face it, you’re not going to force yourself to do that. And you won’t get the depth of knowledge that CS50 will provide. It’s an outstanding course, and it’s incredibly well taught. I’d recommend taking it and then spending J term [three weeks in January when regular HBS classes do not meet] with Stanford’s online CS193P, which will get you to the point of building iPhone apps.”

More blog posts by Thomas R. Eisenmann

More on: Entrepreneurship, Information & technology, Tech industry

THOMAS R. EISENMANN

Tom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, where he chairs the 2nd year of the MBA Program, co-chairs the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, and leads the faculty team that teaches The Entrepreneurial Manager, a required 1st-year MBA course. He also blogs at Platforms & Networks. Follow him on Twitter @teisenmann

How Gigabit Fiber to the Home Will Transform Education Way Beyond MOOC’s

The post below caught my attention because of the current industry debate and competitive battle over deployment of much higher Gigabit Internet bandwidth via optical fiber to consumers, known as Fiber to the Home or FTTH, at prices much lower than they currently pay for even 50 Megabit Internet connectivity.  Gigabit connectivity is already a reality in Hong Kong and South Korea, with Europe not far behind. The big cable carriers, Comcast and Time Warner, have actually argued publicly that consumers don’t want or need higher bandwidth. How they came to that conclusion is a mystery.  Now Google has entered into direct competition with the cable carriers, deploying Gigabit FTTH in Kansas City and Austin, Texas to be followed by other locations, at prices a fraction of Comcast’s pricing for lower bandwidth.  This battle has been admirably described in the book Captive Audience, The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, by Yale Law Professor, Susan P. Crawford.

So people have asked the question, “what will people do with all of this massive bandwidth?” Having lived with Moore’s Law for most of my career, I smile in bemusement. I can remember a fear that the 256K flash memory chip was “too big.” The truth is that if you were asked 20 years ago to predict how we would be using the Internet today, I doubt many would have accurately predicted our current global village.  The few exceptions would be visionaries like Dave Evans, Chief Futurist at Cisco Systems, who authored this Huffington Post article, providing an excellent prediction of how FTTH may impact just one aspect of the future: education.

Reblogged from Huffington Post ImpactX

Beyond Online Classes: How The Internet of Everything Is Transforming Education

Posted: 08/22/2013 10:36 am

By Dave Evans, Chief Futurist, Cisco Systems

éducation, 21st Century, Dave Evans, Internet Of Everything, Bblog-Cisco, Broadband,Connections, Dave The Futurist, Digital Classroom, ImpactX, Learning, Online Classes,BACK TO SCHOOL, Telepresence, Impact News

Over the next few weeks, students will be heading back to school for the fall semester. In fact, my oldest child will be starting college for the first time, and I have another one not far behind. So naturally, I’ve been thinking about the future of education, and the opportunities and challenges 21st century technology might bring.

Technology has had an amazing impact on education in the last few years. But what we’ve seen so far is nothing compared to the sea change that will be created by the Internet of Everything (IoE) in the coming decade. The networked connections among people, processes, data and things will change not just how and where education is delivered, but will also redefine what students need to learn, and why.

When we talk about technology-enabled learning, most people probably think of online classes, which have had mixed results so far. On one hand, online courses can make higher education much more affordable and accessible. On the other hand, not all students can stay engaged and successful without regular feedback and interaction with their instructor and other students. Even the best online classes cannot hope to duplicate the rich spontaneous interactions that can take place among students and instructors in the classroom.

But with connection speeds going up, and equipment costs going down, we can go beyond online classes to create widely accessible immersive, interactive, real-time learning experiences. Soon, time and distance will no longer limit access to an engaging, high quality education. Anywhere there is sufficient bandwidth, a student can participate in a rich virtual classroom experience — attending lectures, asking questions, and participating in real-time discussions with other students.

And the “sufficient bandwidth” requirement is not that far away. Connection speeds to the high-end home user are doubling every 21 months. Said another way, this is a doubling of almost 64 times over the next decade. Consider a home with a 10 Mbps connection today; this same home could have a 640 Mbps in a decade, and a home with a 50 MB broadband connection today might have a 3 GB connection in 10 years — this is sufficient bandwidth to display streaming video on every square inch of the walls of a 1,800-square-foot home! What type of immersive experiences could educators create with these types of connections?

Within the next decade, high connection speeds and low hardware costs could bring immersive, interactive classes right into the home.
Of course this is about more than simply raw network speeds; the Internet of Everything will also impact some of our basic assumptions about the purpose and nature of education. People today generally agree that the purpose of education is to convey knowledge. But if all the world’s knowledge is instantaneously available online via smartphone or Google Glass, how does that affect what we need to teach in school? Perhaps education will become less about acquiring knowledge, and more about how to analyze, evaluate, and use the unlimited information that is available to us. Perhaps we will teach more critical thinking, collaboration, and social skills. Perhaps we will not teach answers, but how to ask the right questions.

I know that technology will never replace the full, face-to-face experience that my son will have when he starts university next month. But technology can supplement and enrich the traditional in-person school experience. And I hope the school my son attends will teach the new set of 21st century skills needed to help him make the most of technology.

Wary of edtech? Coursesmart crashes before student exams

I have heard a number of students express the fear that apps like Coursesmart will crash at the worst possible time:exams. Now it has happened, which creates a market acceptance problem that will take months to repair.. It is similar to the Odwalla juice contamination case study that eventually took the company to near bankruptcy.

Earlier this month, edtech company CourseSmart was awash in press for its new, albeit somewhat controversial, learning tools. Using digital textbooks, CourseSmart shows teachers and professors exactly how much time each student has spent with an assignment. Naturally this ignited concerns about privacy and the message it sends to students. (Are we educating them or babysitting them?) CourseSmart deftly batted those criticisms away with talk of engagement and data and improved teaching methods.

But this week, the company experienced a software company’s worst nightmare: It crashed. This seems to be a lean startup’s right of passage — Tumblr and Twitter’s early histories are peppered with well-publicized outages. Sure, people will whine that they suddenly can’t use their free social media tools, and it makes the startup look incompetent for a day. The difference when an edtech platform crashes, though, is that the consequences are a lot more serious. Unlike Twitter and Tumblr, textbooks and homework are mission-critical to students.

What’s worse is that CourseSmart isn’t a lean startup iterating its way to success. Used by more than 100 institutions, CourseSmart is owned by Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and other major publishers. And CourseSmart’s digital book rentals, which students lose access to after 180 days, are not cheap: 101 books cost between $90 and $100. Tuesday’s crash, which lasted a whole afternoon, led to a stream of angry tweets from students cramming for their exams.

 

Smartphone Classroom Participation Startup Top Hat Monocle Strengthens Its Team

A couple of weeks ago I was asking myself about the current “clicker” classroom participation technology at UBC.  Why did the university implement a proprietary technology with no other practical use, which cost students precious dollars?  It was instantly obvious to me that the students already owned the devices needed to accomplish electronic classroom participation: their smartphones, tablets and laptops.  Even more compelling for me, it could provide a way to reduce the classroom distractions caused by these devices.  It turns out that the reason that the students devices were not being exploited for teaching and learning was fear of “the cloud,” privacy and where the data was being stored, which are legitimate concerns.  It turned out that there is a Canadian company that has created an app that does everything I envisioned and solved all the privacy issues to the satisfaction of a number of educational institutions in British Columbia and across Canada. I am now a trial use of Top Hat Monocle and I am very impressed with it.  I went so far as to introduce one of  Top Hat’s marketing people to the UBC Vancouver IT expert on apps like this.  It is my hope that Monocle can be a breakthrough application for classroom use.

Classroom participation startup Top Hat Monocle strengthens its team with addition of elite CFO and CPO (via Pando Daily)

Toronto-based classroom education startup Top Hat Monocle takes a contrarian position on students’ smartphones. Rather than insist that they put them away, which we all know is a losing proposition, the company uses the devices to drive engagement and participation. Today, the company has beefed up its executive team, announcing the addition Ralf Riekers as its new Chief Financial Officer and Malgosia Green as its Chief Product Officer.

Riekers was the first employee at marketing automation startup Eloqua, where he spent 12 years in areas including finance, operations, product deployment, and customer operations. Eloqua was recently acquired by oracle for $871 million four months after its IPO. At Top Hat, he will focus on improving the company’s back-end processes and managing relationships with the venture community.

Green founded India-based education marketing firm Savvica in 2007 to help students worldwide choose schools to match their needs, and before that was the director of product development for Affinity Labs. At Top Hat Monocle, she will take over the product road map and also promises to “aggressively market” the company’s products.

Top Hat Monocle offers allows students to respond in real-time to instructor questions and polls using their Web-enabled mobile devices. They can also use these second screens – assuming the teacher’s black board or projection screen is the first – to engage in interactive discussions, pose their own questions, download notes, and submit work, among other functions. The company’s products are used at over 250 universities worldwide.

Following an $8 million Series A financing in July from Emergence Capital Partners, iNovia Capital, SoftTech VC, Golden Venture Partners, and Version One Ventures, and the company raised a subsequent $1.1 million strategic round in January, bringing its total financing to $10.7 million. The Top Hat Monocle team has since explode from 20 to 80 employees in the last nine months. According to COO Andrew D’Souza, we should expect additional high profile hires in the near future, including specifically a VP engineering, VP sales, and VP marketing.

Ask any investor or experienced entrepreneur and they’re likely to tell you that success is dictated more by the team that is leading a company than by the idea or the market itself. Top Hat Monocle has the benefit of being in a space that is ripe for disruption, at a time when investors and educators are desperately seeking solutions. Today’s announcements should only strengthen the company’s ability to execute on this massive opportunity.

Enactus UBC Faculty of Management Leadership Team Closes Out It’s First Year

The Enactus UBC Faculty of Management Leadership Team. Left to right front row: Stormy Johanson, Adam Prarie, Julia Moody (President)

Left to right back row: Jesse Shopa, Joey Gidda, David Mayes (faculty advisor), Chris Janiewicz

The formation of the University of British Columbia (UBC), Faculty of Management chapter of Enactus occurred only three months ago, under the guidance of Dean Roger Sugden, but the Enactus student leadership team has already attracted nearly two dozen members, all of whom, including the leadership will return next year, to build the organization for handoff to future Faculty of Management students. Meanwhile, many of our current Enactus members will be off to destinations around the World for the summer.

The Enactus Canadian national organization encouraged us to get out there and just start “doing something” rather than debating the chapter’s by-laws and getting bogged down in meetings.  The team did exactly that, and have already conducted a local food drive that collected over a quarter ton of grocery items prioritized by the Kelowna Food Bank, in only four hours.

The Enactus FOM team have also introduced themselves to the Enactus team at Okanagan College, and observed OC‘s dress rehearsal presentations for the Enactus national competition to get an idea of what we need to do next year.

The global impact and reach of Enactus was made evident to us this week when I was contacted by Doina Olaru, the Enactus faculty advisor from the University of Western Australia in Perth, who is currently on the UBC Okanagan campus conducting research. Doina had somehow found out about me, and asked to meet. I quickly arranged for her to also meet with our student leaders. We were all left in awe by Doina’s story of what she and her students had accomplished in five short years with limited funding. The UWA Enactus team are three time Australian national champions for their projects, and have also appeared at the Enactus global conference.  In addition to creating domestic Australian projects, the UWA team have created award winning projects in Kenya, India and Ghana, all in less than 5 years. Needless to say, our team hope that we can have a bit of their success rub off on us, and we have plans to build our relationship with Doina and to meet her team, as two of our UBC team will be Going Global in Australia very shortly.

Our most important early development has been the emerging plan for a major “Tier Three” project. Tier Three Enactus Projects are those which provide ongoing benefit to the community over multiple years, engage and employ a significant number of local community people in need.  In discussion with our Enactus national field director in Toronto, we learned that of the 63 Enactus chapters at universities across Canada, there are only 2 chapters currently with Tier Three projects. The Enactus national organization is obviously very eager to increase this number. We have shared our early conceptual ideas with the national Enactus organization and they are very enthusiastic and supportive.  For now, our Tier Three project remains under wraps while we do our “due diligence” and seek the endorsement of our key stakeholders, and community organizations who will also need to support the project.  We are hopeful that we can begin early piloting of our Tier Three project over the summer.

Finally, we have reached out to the community for financial support and we are well on our way to obtaining those local community partnerships.

For further information and to join our local Enactus chapter, contact Julia Moody’s mobile 250-801-6402 or mine: 250-864-9552. Or email us at enactusubco@gmail.com.

ABOUT ENACTUS. 

www.enactus.org

A community of student, academic and business leaders committed to using the power of entrepreneurial action to transform lives and shape a better more sustainable world.

entrepreneurial—having the perspective to see an opportunity and the talent to create value from that opportunity;

action—the willingness to do something and the commitment to see it through even when the outcome is not guaranteed;

us—a group of people who see themselves connected in some important way; individuals that are part of a greater whole.

Why Knowing How To Code Is So Important: One Million More Jobs Than Students

As many of my colleagues and students know, student cyber skills are one of my big passions.  Having been incredibly fortunate to be thrown into the whirlwind of Intel and Silicon Valley, I watched as the local secondary schools and universities responded to this.  By the 1980’s the University of California system was requiring UNIX skills (the Berkeley version, of course) of all undergraduates, which later morphed into HTML Web design skill requirements.  I am very gratified to learn that our Computer Science faculty is already focused on providing similar courses with a view to making them part of the curriculum for all undergraduates.

Code.org  the new non-profit aimed at encouraging computer science education launched last month by entrepreneur and investor brothers Ali and Hadi Partovi, has assembled an all-star group of the world’s most well-known and successful folks with programming skills to talk about how learning to code has changed their lives — and isn’t quite as hard as people might think.

In Digital Textbook Transition, Device Availability Is Just The Beginning

The digital textbook market still seems likely to proceed at a snail’s pace. It also appears that the university textbook market may be a very different market segment from the broader book market represented by Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Chapters in Canada. Current UBC Bookstore estimates of E Reader textbook sales is 5%. Renting textbooks, textbook sharing, and just flat out electing not to buy the textbook still seem strong trends.

The high prices of the big textbook publishers, Wiley, Pearson, and Addison Wesley would cause one to surmise that the price of hardbound textbooks would drive students to much lower cost electronic licenses on e readers, but this does not seem to be the case.  Theories abound as to the reason for this.  A common explanation is fear of the technology not working at exactly the wrong moment, and limited or no technical support available, compared to the simplicity of old fashioned paper books.

This morning, a NPR Morning Edition story also delved into this topic,  reporting on young readers who still want paper bound books, or as one suggested, they may want both paper and e book, but paper still trumps.  It seems clear that there is strong consumer resistance to moving to e books.

Gigaom

Among technology’s top titans, the race is on to bring tablet-based digital textbooks into the classroom. Since launching the iPad, Apple (s AAPL) has made a big push in education, and its expected iPad Mini launch this week will likely open it up to an even wider range of education customers. Last week, Amazon (s AMZN) announced a new Whispercast feature to help schools centrally purchase and distribute content to a fleet of student devices. And Microsoft’s Surface (s MSFT), as well as Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10.1 and Chromebook (released with Google (s GOOG)), are also contenders for new classroom tools.

With each new launch, someone inevitably declares the impending end of physical textbooks, as though those tech giants control the levers responsible for the successful adoption of new technology in schools. But while the tech industry plays a significant role in the transition to digital textbooks, making devices…

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