Poets&Quants’ Top Stories Of 2024

IN THE CLASSROOM

When AI Helps Students Learn & When It Doesn’t: An Emory Prof’s Groundbreaking Study

Quiz time. Which of these four learning environments involving the use — or non-use — of artificial intelligence results in the best academic outcomes for college students?

AI-generated content and AI delivery

AI-generated content and human delivery

Human-generated content and human delivery

Human-generated content and AI delivery

To find the answer, Emory Goizueta Business School Professor Rajiv Garg enlisted nearly six dozen undergraduate students across multiple disciplines for an in-class experiment. And what he discovered may surprise you and change your mind about the potential of AI in the classroom — for MBAs, undergraduate B-school students, and everyone else.


Learning AI ‘From Its Core’: Inside Professor Tinglong Dai’s Course At Johns Hopkins Carey Business School

The growth of artificial intelligence and its wholehearted embrace by business higher education has surprised even those who have long studied it. Count among them Professor Tinglong Dai, who teaches a first-of-its-kind MBA course at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School called Data Science: Artificial Intelligence.

“The practical use of AI is so new,” says Dai, who joined the Carey Business School in 2013 and has since been working with AI, well before its explosion into the mainstream in 2022. “I remember attending an AI conference in LA in 2010, when most people outside of academia would ask me ‘what is AI?’ when I told them about the conference,” he says.


MBA@UNC: Kenan-Flagler’s Online MBA Has Proven The Early Skeptics Wrong

MBA@UNC

MBA@UNC students during one of their on-campus residencies

“The way you show up matters to the people you work with. The choices you make can get you into stress. When you are in fear, uncertainty or stress, it’s difficult to do things well. This is not about being positive and optimistic. It’s about being authentic.”

The speaker is not a psychologist. It’s a business professor, in this case, it’s Michael Christian, a professor of organizational behavior at the Kenan-Flagler Business School.


IMD Reinvents Its MBA For The AI Revolution

With the likelihood that machines may be smarter than people in as little as two decades, business schools all over the world are rethinking how to produce graduates that cannot be replaced by an algorithm.

With most professors still debating exactly what to do about the AI revolution, IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland, has devised an innovative answer. In a major redesign of its one-year MBA curriculum, IMD is betting that human skills not easily duplicated by machine intelligence is the best way to prepare students for the AI future.

The school’s reimagined MBA experience, to take effect when it enrolls its new MBA cohort in January, is one of the boldest changes yet in response to how powerful AI will change society and the world of work. For one thing, the new program acknowledges that we are not living with change as usual. The MBA curriculum—informed by corporate executives, faculty, and alumni—accepts that the world is fundamentally changing with the advent of machine intelligence.

Next page: Stories from the 2024 job hunt …

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