Students, academics and business professionals increasingly are functioning more like a learning team, pooling their abilities to understand processes and solve problems. Today's team approach reaches beyond academia too. Tech companies such as Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM are forging alliances with numerous schools both to help shape content and to recruit resulting graduates. Another conference is slated for later this year. Students are off the bench too.
Many courses engage students as consultants to real companies to solve specific problems.
And the variety of backgrounds students are bringing to class has become a side benefit professors are putting to good use. I've taught physicians, grammar school teachers, homemakers, CEOs. Each will take an assignment in a unique direction. It makes for lively learning. What I try to do is provide the logic, the framework, the way of thinking about, say, e-commerce strategy.