One of the trends in business education is the involvement of business experts in academic activities. Business practitioners illustrate the application of knowledge to solve management problems, which makes learning more applied. Speakers of the Graduate School of Management of St. Petersburg University (GSOM SPbU) spoke about the practice-oriented approach to curricula at the EdCrunch conference.

Andrey Zyatchin, Academic Director of MBA programs at GSOM SPbU, noted that academic and managerial experience, as well as an understanding of the university's corporate culture, are important for lecturers in executive programs: “GSOM SPbU faculty conduct research in the field of management and transfer new knowledge to students of MBA and EMBA programs. The competence of a lecturer allows him or her to accumulate the experience of many organizations, to establish patterns and present them in an easy-to-understand form. Reducing the time to create and deliver new knowledge is especially important in a rapidly changing world. Business practitioners speak about the application of systemic management knowledge, who can give a guest lecture or conduct a course. At GSOM SPbU there is a practice of training business representatives for teaching activities on programs for managers."

GSOM SPbU, together with VTB Bank and Moscow City Pedagogical University (MGPU), is implementing the “Toolkit for a Business School Professor of Practice” project. The result of training for each business practitioner is a detailed structure of the author's course, developed by him together with a team of experienced GSOM's professors.

“GSOM SPbU actively involves experts from business in the educational process. In order to convert the knowledge and experience of a business practitioner into an educational product, the "Toolkit for a Business School Professor of Practice" was created and tested at the GSOM SPbU site in the format of an educational intensive. Now we have begun to create a platform solution that will help practitioners already independently familiarize themselves with the basics of designing educational programs and create their own courses in a specially designed constructor. Such a solution will expand the funnel of ideas at the entrance and reduce the time to market new practice-oriented programs and modules, '' said Roman Sorokin, a member of the GSOM SPbU project office, advisor at VTB Bank.

The case session was moderated by Kirill Barannikov, Vice-Rector for Development of the Moscow City Pedagogical University, co-author of the project.

The event recording is available here >> (in Russian only)