By Kalle Lyytinen
We recently began the 26th year of the program with a new cohort of students. Welcome to the class of 2024! We are also happy to be back on campus finally and experience the normal buzz and excitement of the on-site residencies. We have missed them since spring 2020. It was good to see familiar and new faces and experience the power of informal discussions, bonds being created, and intellectual dialogues that follow ex tempore interactions inside and outside the classroom. The new academic year also introduces small changes to our program. We moved to three on-site residencies per term. There are some good lessons learned from the pandemic, one of which is to find an optimal balance between virtual and embodied, face-to-face pedagogy. We will continue to evaluate our experiences from this year and see how we can continue to better balance our educational offerings in the future.
Another change in the coming year is that we are currently conducting a significant revamp of our method sequence that builds student skills to carry out mixed method research. As more on-line and authentic data is available and more of it is in unstructured and non-invoked forms, we will increasingly focus on offering multiple ways to collect and analyze data, and also build more productive and organic connections between the qualitative and quantitative methods and related inquiries. We recognize the decreasing value and need for conducting survey-based research (or pure interview research) in lieu of using various secondary data sets available in companies and other settings (such as open communities, government etc.), or conducting either natural experiments or laboratory experiments. The idea is that we need to become more open and versatile in our choices of using methods while we address important practical problems. At the same time, we do not have the luxury of more real estate (course credits) to build up these competencies during a three-year period and need to make hard choices. To this end, we have been developing jointly with the methods teaching faculty, a fuller competency map of practitioner-scholar research skills and related inquiry competencies. By drawing on this commonly shared understanding of the student outcome skills, we can in the future make more informed decisions about which skills are obligatory, and which ones are on the side of good to know. The map has initially been drawn. During the fall and spring semesters, we will articulate the consequences of implementing this outcome goal set for our program and what it implies in terms of course changes and emphases. We will communicate the key findings of this analysis with the current students and alumni later this academic year.
Finally, we have been working with the school’s marketing and development departments and other stakeholders on the “WOW” factors that characterize this unique program. The request came initially from a group of alumni who are supportive of the program. They asked us to be clearer about the truly distinguishing and outstanding features of this program to make it better and continue its impact as new competitive threats emerge. In our discussions so far, we have come up with: continued excellence as reflected in the effort to reorganize the method sequence; rigor as reflected in our constant focus on improving the scholarly skills of students; and, transformative thinking as echoed in the ideas that the students engage with during the program and by the results that they bring to bear in their practices. If you have other ideas that moved you during your study and made your learning experience or program outcomes unique, please do not hesitate to let us know.
