PRESS RELEASES
LOS ANGELES, Calif. —The Graduate Management Admission Council® (GMAC®), owner of the GMAT® exam and the leading membership organization of graduate business and management schools worldwide, today awarded the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University a $60,000 grant to develop requirements and specifications for a cloud-based knowledge-exchange “portal” that allows business schools to conduct peer-to-peer collaboration to address student learning innovations and related issues.
“The goal of the Management Education Collaboration Network (MECNET), Pepperdine’s GMAC MET Fund project, is to provide the management education community with a dynamic Internet-based vehicle to drive innovation regarding student learning through the sharing and exchanging of ideas,” said project lead Dr. Owen Hall, Jr., a Professor of Decision Sciences at Pepperdine’s Graziadio School. “This effort builds on work that has been conducted at the Graziadio School over the past several years. Two specific Graziadio initiatives include the measurement of faculty attitudes towards the hybrid learning model and the design of a prototype faculty collaboration network.”
The GMAC Management Education for Tomorrow (MET) Fund has awarded more than US$7.1 million in grants to 12 organizations across six countries in the second round of its Ideas to Innovation (i2i) Challenge. The i2i Challenge was created and managed by the GMAC’s MET Fund, a US$10 million initiative to advance business education around the world.
Schools and organizations developed their grant proposals in response to an earlier phase of the i2i Challenge, in which individuals were invited to answer the question, “What one idea would improve graduate management education?” In total, 17 of the 20 winning i2i concepts, which were announced in January 2011, will be implemented by the organizations that were awarded today.
Twenty-five proposals from seven countries were submitted in the second round of the challenge, which ran from January to December 2011. The grantees include business schools and organizations in the U.S., Canada, Spain, Italy, India and Botswana.
Pepperdine’s MECNET project is expected to start early May and end in late December with delivery of a RFP.
“By any standard management education has come a long way since Sir Isaac Pitman initiated the first correspondence course in the early 1840s. Today, the hybrid learning model, which combines the best practices of the traditional classroom with the power of the Internet, is becoming the name of the game in management education,” said Dr. Hall.
Additional information about all GMAC Met Fund winning entries and the organizations that submitted them is available here. Information about the first-round winners and the ideas they generated is here.
About Pepperdine University Graziadio School of Business and Management
Founded on the core values of integrity, stewardship, courage, and compassion, Pepperdine University’s Graziadio (GRAT-ZEE-ah-DEE-oh) School of Business and Management has been developing values-centered leaders and advancing responsible business practice since 1969. Student-focused, experience-driven, and globally-oriented, the Graziadio School offers fully accredited MBA, Masters of Science, and bachelor’s completion business programs. More information found at http://bschool.pepperdine.edu/newsroom/.
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