Some areas of knowledge change little over time – but others, like AI and entrepreneurship, evolve so quickly that faculty must redesign them every semester.
Doug Hannah, associate professor of business administration at Gies College of Business, and his colleague, Sioban O’Mahony from Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, identify these rapidly evolving subjects as ‘fields in flux’ – areas where knowledge, tools, and expectations change quickly. They studied how faculty approach these courses and offered some best practices. Their findings, “Navigating Pedagogical Dilemmas When Fields are In Flux,” were recently published in the Academy of Management Learning.
“Fields in flux tend to have people vying for control or authority over what a subject should be about and who is well-positioned for it,” Hannah explained. “This often happens in high-growth fields like AI, which has a ton of resources pouring into it.”
Key Teaching Dilemmas in Rapidly Changing Fields
As with many studies, Hannah's research began with curiosity. “I started off wondering how entrepreneurship is taught elsewhere, and what other professors were teaching,” Hannah said. "In doing so, we ended up finding patterns that apply across fields, like AI, for instance.”
What Hannah and his coauthor found was a set of teaching dilemmas that nearly every educator had to handle: what to teach, how to teach, and what learning goals to target.
“The dilemmas educators face are similar across lots of high-growth fields,” Hannah noted. “In AI, for instance, what topics and models should we be talking about? Should we be talking about ethics? Should we be talking about applications? What is the goal? Are we teaching people to be consumers of AI? Are we teaching them to produce models? Are we teaching them integration? These are basically the same fundamental questions we see in entrepreneurship, just in a different context.”
While professors are hired because of their expertise, universities provide a lot of freedom in defining course objectives. But for faculty, this means they're often wrestling with different visions for what the course could be, or wading through a huge menu of potential topics, usually on their own.
“In entrepreneurship, that could be learning to launch (a startup) vs. learning to think (with an entrepreneurial mindset),” Hannah said. “Historically, entrepreneurship was all about creating, growing, and running small businesses. Over the past 20 years, though, it has evolved. The ability to think creatively and with resilience, and to work in teams, is becoming more important. It makes sense that this kind of instruction is falling under the category of entrepreneurship.”
The challenge, Hannah notes, is that the types of topics and the types of outcomes associated with starting and running ventures are very different from creative thinking in general. Many students who are taking courses in entrepreneurship have no intention of starting a business; rather, they want to learn how to solve problems.
That makes course design decisions fundamental, and it can introduce difficult questions around testing and evaluation. “How do we know if we are making our students more creative? We’re making people better managers. We’re making them more creative, resilient individuals. Would we expect to find it show up in quantifiable metrics? It’s not clear.”
Four Strategies Educators Use to Navigate Fields in Flux
By comparing almost 100 different entrepreneurship courses at different universities and interviewing dozens of educators, Hannah and his coauthor identified a handful of strategies for navigating these challenges.
“What our analysis suggested was that it came down to how the faculty conceptualized it and what they thought was the best way to engage students,” Hannah explained. “That was the overriding theme – individual faculty making choices of how to best set up their students for success and introduce a topic they were passionate about.”
Some of these strategies relied on clever course design to weave lessons together and manage classroom time more efficiently. For example, templates such as The Lean Startup or the Business Model Canvas allowed students to get hands-on experience with entrepreneurial practice, simulating expertise and building confidence. Similarly, cases could be used to achieve multiple objectives, like using a case on team building to illustrate the impact of demographic diversity.
The most creative and impactful strategies instead required faculty to rethink their students' entire educational journey. These faculty pointed to opportunities outside the classroom, which enabled them to gain more resources.
“Often, that was linking students with campus accelerators or the local startup community or bringing in business leaders,” Hannah said. “In doing so, they are weaving the ecosystem into a student’s entire course of study.”
One of the findings that surprised Hannah was how faculty's individual approaches to managing these tradeoffs amplified the heterogeneity of the field.
“There was a general concern among a lot of people we interviewed that templates were going to take over and squash out all the beauty and the heterogeneity and the individual nuances of entrepreneurship, because it’s easy to teach to a template and do it poorly,” Hannah said. “It is more like a recipe. If you can follow a recipe well, does that make you a good chef? Most of us would say it just makes you a good rule follower. To do it well, we need to teach the principles that allow them to be great chefs, or in our case, entrepreneurs.”
In all cases, the challenge is the realization that course materials need to be fresh.
“A lot of faculty members who are teaching multiple classes across different subject areas find it hard to have the time to think about it,” Hannah said. “One of the things that I’ve enjoyed about Gies Business is having the bandwidth and the staff expertise. Even though I am a subject matter expert, there are people with much deeper training in pedagogical design that I can work with.”
One way Gies demonstrated an ability to stay on the cutting edge is by launching an innovation in the health care education – a fully online graduate certificate and specialization in Gies’ online MBA program, the iMBA ®.
“Core areas of study, the toolsets, and the theories aren’t well established in fields in flux. So, of course, you are going to see change – new courses, new frameworks are going to be constantly popping up, and you are going to constantly have to be revising,” Hannah said.
As far as entrepreneurship is concerned, Hannah believes that the study gives a snapshot of the field and some practical strategies to navigate and understand the flux as professors design courses.
“What started as simple curiosity, in the end, allowed us to ask some important questions,” Hannah concluded. “One of the things that I’m most proud of is that it has a meaningful theoretical contribution and also is extremely practical for educators.”