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New York University management professor Glenn Okun throws a 500-page, spiral-bound book of Xeroxed course materials onto his desk. The thick tome contains nearly 20 business case studies and represents just half the reading his students will plow through this fall—fairly typical of MBA courses.
"Leafing through one of these is like leafing through the equivalent of the Manhattan Yellow Pages," he says.
Next, Okun unsheathes the alternative: an iPad edition of the same course materials—a feature NYU introduced last year. In each digital case study, students can highlight material in fluorescent colors and take notes. A tap on the screen allows them to skip to an exhibit at the end of a document, and then follow the menu back to where they left off reading—with no virtual or actual page-leafing required. All the features work offline.
"Now," Okun asks, "which would you prefer?"
Case studies are the lifeblood of a business school’s curriculum. Each describes a company or economic scenario that actually happened. Students decide what they would have done had they been making decisions.
As case studies migrate to tablet form, they have the potential to undergo some of the greatest transformations in the way students interact with the material since the case method was introduced at Harvard Business School in 1924. Over the ensuing 87 years, the case study has undergone some changes but remains much as it was at its inception—a straightforward narrative of business success or failure. Tablet technology may make the case study more of an interactive experience.
Harvard Business School, the largest publisher of case studies in North America, is in the process of converting 3,500 of its files to tablet-enhanced formats during this school year and expects to finish converting its library of 17,000 titles by 2013. The University of Western Ontario’s Ivey School of Business, the second-largest publisher, made over 500 of its cases available via Apple’s iBookstore at the end of June.
When Harvard is finished, purists will be able to access the digital documents in their original layout. Professors would be able to bring them to life as they see fit by embedding chief executive officer videos, audio files, and a number of additional assets within the text, which Harvard would provide—or instructors might select on their own.
The tablet medium also seems ideal for simulated cases, says Glenn Rowe, a professor at the Ivey school and author of nearly 40 case studies. In role-playing exercises, prices and other variables can change on the fly. Students may also be smacked with unexpected events, such as their biggest competitor slashing prices, or by their receiving a higher-than-expected counterbid after a merger proposal. Students choose what they would do, and the simulation immediately tells them the consequence of that action.
"I think it will get to the point where [academics] write a case study that is designed for a tablet experience," says Maureen Betses, vice-president of higher education at Harvard Business Publishing.
Still, most cases are already available as PDFs. When Harvard’s tablet case library goes live, the enhanced documents will also be accessible on a laptop. So why is there so much excitement over tablets?
For one thing, tablets are easier to carry than reams of photocopies assembled for classes such as Okun’s. At business school, case-study reading often trumps textbook reading, and administrators see MBA candidates preferring the tablet and other mobile devices over laptops for digital delivery. Students are also more inclined to use tablets for supplemental reading. (Assuming prices are the same, 86 percent of college students say they prefer a hard copy textbook to an e-textbook, according to the market research firm Student Monitor.)
©2011 Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved.
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