Under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, two MIT lectures were held virtually for Fudan IMBA students by Professors from MIT Sloan School of Management this semester. The topics covered Platform Strategy and a Climate Solutions Workshop. Even though the lectures were conducted online, it turned out to be an interactive exploration between the MIT professors and our students.
Recently, Professor Jason Jay, Senior Lecturer and Director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative brought an intriguing online experience to our students. During his Climate Solutions Workshop, Professor Jay first gave a lecture on the urgency to act on climate change, the lack of national policy in this regard and the challenges entailed for business leaders. Then he led Fudan IMBA students to explore the complex interactions between politics, economics, technology, and the environment through En-ROADS, a computer simulation developed by his team.
After the session, we invited Professor Jay to join an interview with us, talking about the online learning and the future development of education.
Why do you deem simulation to be an important approach in education?
In the exercise that I did for Fudan IMBA students in this climate action simulation, we used a computer model that we've developed at MIT Sloan to understand the interaction between different climate actions and impacts.
The computer simulation tool allows us to run interactive experiments, students can learn for themselves how climate change works from an economic, technological and scientific perspective. In addition, we made it a role playing game, where students broke up into eight different interest groups. For example, one group represented the fossil fuel companies, one played the governments of rapidly emerging markets, and one played the land, forestry and agriculture companies. They actually had to argue and debate for the policies that were in their group’s interests. And then we tested them on the computer model. So the students get to directly experience, produce and simulate the social and political dynamics around a contentious issue like climate change, and to deeply understand how the economic, technical and climate systems work.
Our team at MIT Sloan have done a couple of experimental studies that look at the impact of this simulation-based learning. The quality of the learning is just dramatically higher when people get to do and learn things for themselves. When you're training a pilot to fly an aircraft, you don't put them in a real aircraft until they have flown a certain number of hours in a computer simulator. Similarly, we shouldn't be putting people in charge of organizations that have a big influence on the world or public policies shaping the future of the planet without having them run some time on a simulator.
Computer simulations in education go back to the 1970s, but the technology is getting easier and easier to deploy high quality simulations over the web. Now synchronous interactions in Zoom allow you to play experiential simulation games over the web in ways that we would only know how to do in person before.
Educators are exploring the intersection of education and AI. Do you think AI can play an important role in universities and business schools like they do in fields like language study or primary education?
It really depends on the type of material and the assignments. For the massively open online courses (the MOOCs) that MIT has offered, they have been using automated grading so that you can scale up to tens of thousands of people participating. But that's not really using machine learning. It's more using just pattern recognition.
With the kind of stuff that we do, where we deal a lot with ethics and sustainability issues, there's a lot of very qualitative argumentation. Though it might be possible to train a machine learning algorithm to recognize quality, unfortunately I think right now, one of the most useful applications of AI is to catch plagiarism.
How have the online classes been conducted in MIT?
We did everything synchronously with everyone joining a Zoom call and we made a lot of use of the breakout rooms, which is a really good feature for small group conversations. There was sort of a rhythm of doing some lecture, getting students to raise hands and ask questions, going into breakout rooms to do some practice, then coming back to the plenary to report out. We recorded all the Zoom calls for anyone who has to be asynchronous, like the students who had to go back to China.
We also use Canvas, which is the most widely used and most powerful learning management system in the U.S. and it has a really nice discussion groups feature. All the assignments are on the class page: the readings, the group discussions, and the links to the Zoom classes. It's like the online home base. During the synchronous discussion, the team of students in charge of helping to lead that day would do some extra reading and come up with some good discussion questions for everyone. At the end of the session, they put a summary of the class on the Canvas discussion board. Then everyone had an assignment to respond to those discussions and to add some reflections. That way anyone who was participating asynchronously could also join in the conversation.
Overall, I think we would prefer to be in person, but given the constraints of the coronavirus, everybody at MIT Sloan was very pleasantly surprised by how well we were able to teach online. That's partly why with this class for Fudan IMBA, I insist to work with the team to make it happen, because I knew that we could create a pretty good experience over the web.
With the pandemic shaking the world in so many ways, do you see an imminent shift, or a chance for innovation in business school education?
I think in many fields, this has been a trigger for people to finally really explore virtual interaction for things they didn't think they could before. For example, my wife is a doctor. They've been talking about telemedicine for many years, and now finally she gets to do 100% telemedicine for her patients. When the quarantine ends, they're not going to back off to 0% telemedicine. I would say that in higher education, the same phenomenon is happening.
And there are some real advantages in doing them online, particularly if you have groups of people who are geographically dispersed. For example, twice a year, I conduct a renewable energy finance forum for alumni of MIT Sloan on campus. They're coming from all around the United States, some from Latin America and other places outside of the U.S. and that would always have been in person. But this time we conducted it virtually over Zoom. We were able to do everything – a good faculty lecture, a good case discussion, even some networking with students. And we had roughly 50% more people showing up than we would have in an in-person environment, because they didn't have to carve out the time and money for travel. So we had a more robust group at the table, therefore for the students involved, there was more variety, more chance of making useful connections with the alumni and more chances of getting hired. We’ve also been having guest lectures this spring. The cost is much lower for the CEOs to just join a Zoom call with us than to fly to Cambridge.
When the walls of the classroom become more permeable, all of a sudden it becomes possible to bring together a more global community for learning together. We don't really know yet what new possibility that’s going to open up.
How you compare the online with in-person learning in MIT?
Though I've been painting an optimistic picture about online learning, there's a real tension among our students in MIT Sloan in their dialogue about what they want for the fall semester. What the students are paying tuition for is the on-campus experience of MIT, building relationships with the faculty in a more one-on-one, intimate kind of way, getting to be part of all the research, laboratories and the multi-disciplinary studies that happen around MIT. They want to be part of Kendall Square, where there are thousands of startup companies and investors. They want to be part of Cambridge and Boston, where there's a whole variety of different industries and sectors that they want to engage with. They are willing to take risks for their health for all these. So there is still very much a premium being placed on that in-person experience.
When everybody has to be six feet apart, the capacity of the classrooms dramatically decreases by a factor of three or four. So if there is a strong demand for in-person experience and the supply is dramatically lower, then economics tells us that the price is going to go up, and there is going to be an even bigger premium to be in person.
But if the reality is that the quality of the inner of the education is just as good online, and people start to see that, then the demand will go down and we can balance the price. In my mind, it's just very, very hard to forecast exactly what this is going to look like. Right now, the main thing that the faculty and the institutions of higher education need to be able to do is to ensure flexibility and to be able to maneuver between online and in-person experiences.
When facing a public crisis like this, what social responsibility should young business leaders take on?
The starting point is to understand that a company survives and succeeds to the extent that it's meeting the needs of all of its stakeholders. We have this idea in American capitalism over the last 30 to 40 years that financial shareholders are the primary people who get to decide whether a firm is successful or not. But what we're seeing is that that's not the case. Sometimes companies have to bear some short term costs and some loss in profits in order to keep their employees on payroll, even when their customers aren't able to provide revenue because of the quarantine effect. Adapting operations requires additional investments, whether that’s plexiglass barriers, pickup and delivery options or other things in order to maintain customer loyalty, customer participation and ultimately the success of the enterprise.
The task of management at this moment is to deeply understand the needs of employees, customers, suppliers and the surrounding communities, and it has to be done from a health standpoint and an economic standpoint. In addition, your shareholders are looking to see if you can manage to make any margin or profits in the middle of all this challenge… So I don't think there are right answers. You have to constantly be shifting your mind from: “What feels like the right thing right now?” to “Let me think through a few different scenarios of what could happen in a year. If I have to tell the story about the action that I'm taking right now, is this going to look smart or dumb? Is it going to look evil or benevolent?” and trying to come up with the actions that are going to be robust under all of those different scenarios.
So I think scenario thinking turns out to be a really important skill right now. We emphasize it a lot in our teaching in the spring, and I think it is part of what leadership and management look like right now.
Biography of Professor Jason Jay
Jason Jay is a Senior Lecturer and Director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative. He teaches executive and masters-level courses on strategy, innovation, and leadership for sustainable business. He has helped secure MIT Sloan's position as a leader in the field of sustainability through teaching, research, and industry engagement.
Dr. Jay's publications have appeared in in the Academy of Management Journal and California Management Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and Greenbiz. With Gabriel Grant, he is the author of the international bestseller Breaking Through Gridlock: The Power of Conversation in a Polarized World.
Dr. Jay also works as a facilitator for companies, organizations, and business families, supporting high quality conversation and shared commitment to ambitious sustainability goals. His clients have included Novartis, Bose, Environmental Defense Fund, BP and the World Bank.
