EE-teaching without a net

"E"-teaching without a net could mean entrepreneurial teaching - the theme of this OBCTC '08 Blog and our Babson conference. In the way that I report this event, it does, but it also means "electronic" teaching - the e (as in e-mail) that has preceded so many of our current ways of reaching others. Entrepreneurial teaching is definitely working without a net to catch us. That net would be to be in full control of our classes and the students' assignments. It would be to lecture the whole hour, so as to be sure the content was delivered. It would be to craft exams for east grading, with a high percentage of T-F and multiple choice answers to remove our responsibility for adjudicating correctness.

I am reporting here a moment of "ee (entrepreneurial electronic) teaching that happened last Friday in front of an international OB teaching audience. It turned out fine, but for about 15 minutes, we three who were teaching the OBTS Webinar held on to our proverbial trapeze bars with one hand and swung for deal life.

Well, for dear life is an exaggeration. We just hoped that the cause of nearly our entire roster of signed up participants would be let into the Website. We were ready precisely at 2 PM, having done all the technology testing a few days before. Then, we noticed no one had been let in. Hmmm. Fortunately, one participant got in to the web-room to tell us that the link to the webinar had not been switched on. A scary moment of flying across the void with one hand slipping off the trapeze bar hit me - the moderator of this event. My fellow teacher and I talked about the coincidence of his life's work being about learning leading in and from action, and here we were in one of those free-fall moments that happens when we release our controls that attempt to govern what and how students learn from us. Unfortunately, there was only that one person able to hear us be reflective practitioners.

Meanwhile, our partners whose campus hosted the event leaped into action and quickly learned that our web-master in India had been detained from coming to his company to activate the link by a traffic accident. He made it in time to let in the registrants who waited and 20 went on to experience an hour of quite fascinating virtual teaching and learning.

Afterwards, Our web-host, fortunately unhurt in the accident, sent us an email and called to apologise. My response to him was genuine. Assuring him that his escape from being harmed in the accident meant far more to us, I said that we are just learning how to stage these OBTS webinars. This was our third and each time we discover something that could have sent us plunging to the floor of the center ring. Now we know how to make sure this sort of glitch does not happen. There will be others, as we extend and expand the experiment.

Our knowledge of how "EE-teaching" grows along with our confidence to do more of these after OBTC 2008 leading up to OBTC 2009. We are compelled by the potential to foster rich e-conversations among us about and in between the Webinars. Each one is recorded and archived on our OBTS website. Here online is a new sort of interactive literature, live and lively. This is what it means to be a teaching society bent on making management education work (without a net.

All's well the starts something better the next time.