The Future of MBA Textbooks
August 23, 2010
The motion picture for Finance 201 will be hitting the iPad in 2015, maybe sooner. The future is becoming less cloudy for US graduate school education. The traditional book—a clunky, environmentally hostile dog—is a goner. The first step away from textbooks is to convert grad school content into a comic book. Once this is underway, it will be a short step to making a college textbook into an app and then a full-scale, kick back, pass-the-popcorn event.
You can read about the comic book part in “Graphic Novel Replaces Business School Textbook.” The USA Today story reported:
In addition to telling a story with pictures and text bubbles as a traditional comic book would, Short’s book also has paragraphs of text on certain pages, which allows the author to create a richer discussion of content than a normal comic book would, Moliterno said. On the other hand, he noted that it’s difficult to skip around in the textbook because it follows a narrative arc, and confines the professor to framing a course entirely around the book.
Expository content in the style of Maxim magazine will certainly work for MBAs. Look at the wonderful work these folks have done at Enron, Tyco, and other firms. Next up? Brain surgery and nuclear physics. Why should learning be difficult. How will MBA style education deliver an Enron-type of power generation facility? That will be exciting. Let’s keep information simple. One “real” consulting firm specializes in making complexities simple. Works really well I bet. Yep, user experience is taking precedent over content or learning.
Stephen E Arnold, August 23, 2010
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