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Elements of the Learning Approach

Participants will have different methods to determine the extent of learning. Each lesson has built-in feedback tools useful in measuring progress.

Good Ideas Quickly Applied

In this type of program, you will assess success based on how well you apply concepts, not on receiving a grade.

Flexibility in Learning

Most of the material can be accessed at any time day or night. If the technology permits, lectures can be streamed to individual computers.

Classic Articles and Book Chapters

We sift out the low-value stuff so you don’t have to. We put together a reading list that includes the chapters from the best books and the best articles we can get permission to use.

Contemporary On-Line Articles

As part of the program, we share with you current thinking and relevant case studies pulled from popular business magazines.

A State of The Art Learning Management System

We augment traditional methods with a state-of-the-art e-learning platform to enhance the transfer of knowledge.

Robust Communication Tools

Legacee maintains a suite of application service providers with information tools that allow participants to master information technology tools such as holding virtual meetings. For example, students that have webcams can communicate with other online.

Why The University Model May Not Make Good Sense For Corporations

There are many good educators in the system who care and are going the very best they can to ensure students learn something valuable. That said, the modern university has not changed much since the basic model was devised centuries ago. And it probably won’t change much even though there are other models out there (Wood, 2014).

Even universities with visionary leaders are unlikely to change the status quo much. Partly this is the nature of the current system and how that system maintains itself. New Ph. D’s must-have to conform to the “publish or perish” paradigm or they will never get tenure. Existing faculty and administrators are vested in the existing order and strive to keep things the same. The accreditation process, which is supposed to ensure a quality education, also ends up creating commodity degrees.

For example, an MBA received in Asia or Europe is similar to that received in the United States. This is good for an HR manager hiring worldwide, but not so good for the prospective new hire who can’t say why her degree is better than his. 

Major elements of the university learning model include:

The Ritual of the Lecture.

Typically this is a one-way communication mechanism rarely encouraging questions or the Socratic Method. Students become passive listeners, functioning like a simple input/output device that simply records what is seen and heard.

Large Class Sizes. Undergrads especially are put in as large a lecture hall as possible for core classes.

Priority Goes to Publishing Not Teaching. Some universities get the balance of teaching, research and service right; but for most, publishing in obscure journals counts more than putting together good classes (Carroll, 2011).

Too Much Emphasis on Papers. Sure, writing is important, but how many students will ever write a research paper in the real world? You can’t even blog parts of it, it would be too boring. I remember my first employer sending this individual to a class to learn how to write clearly and concisely, something you won’t learn in a 15-page research paper. You should also realize many professors are having students do papers so they take advantage of student research to help augment their own research. 

G.P.A. (grade point average) Is the Ultimate Success Measure. This is despite the fact that GPA has very little correlation (some would say no correlation) to success in the real world. This has been said by no less than an employer than Google (Soave, 2013), In fact, if you wanted to get a job at Google, other skills are much more important to have than a high GPA (Friedman, 2014).

Theory Not Grounded in What Works in the Real World. Sad to say, in some fields Ph. Ds lack practical work experience in the area they are teaching (Menand, 2014). For example, many entrepreneurial professors who have never run a business (or they ran a business and failed), leadership professors who were never in a leadership role in government or business, marketing professors who have never run a marketing campaign in the real world, etc. The list is endless. 

I remember once participating in a discussion about how to increase student enrollment. I offered the opinion that, “We ought to teach the competencies employers are looking for.” Immediately and with a great deal of indignity, two professors responding with, “We are not a trade school.” And this was in a university where the two cash cows were business and architecture. 

Wrap-Up

If you are like me, you have gotten tired of taking university classes. Maybe it’s because I had hundreds of hours of seat time getting the BS, MBA, and an MA. Even in the first degree, it became very obvious that whole classes could never be applied.

But if you want to learn skills valued by employers, you should start our Academy program.

References

Carroll, Sean (2011). How to Get Tenure at a Major Research University, Discover: Science For the Curious. March 30. 

Friedman, Thomas (2014). How to Get a Job at Google. New York Times, February 22.

Johnson, Diane (2014). Why Companies Want Competency-Based Education. EvoLLLution: Illuminating the Life Long Learning Environment.

Ingraham, Christopher (2014). The College Majors Most Likely To Lead to Underemployment, Washington Post, August 26.

Menand, Louis (2014). The Ph.D. Problem, Harvard Magazine. November-December 2009.

Soave, Robby (2013). Google Executive: GAP and Text Scores Worthless For Hiring. The Daily Caller. June 20.

Wood, Graeme (2014). The Future of College? The Atlantic. August 13.