New dynamics will play critical role in organisational recovery

Online teaching, once a threat to some business schools, has "come to their rescue"

Letsai Mashishi, acting executive education director at Unisa’s Graduate School of Business Leadership (GSBL)

Programmes dealing with the new dynamics brought about by Covid-19 seen as essential to organisations’ recovery

Covid-19 will create "profound change" in the way business is conducted in the future, says Letsai Mashishi, acting executive education director at Unisa’s Graduate School of Business Leadership (GSBL).

He says: "This pandemic is creating new dynamics and needs in fields like remote work, customer engagement, and others that will play a critical role in organisational recovery and success." Business schools, through their executive development programmes, need to anticipate this change. They must "adapt and evolve" to meet client needs. He says the GSBL has experienced few programme postponements or cancellations because of Covid-19. Like other schools, however, it is undergoing a mass migration from classroom to online teaching.

"The appetite from participants for online offerings will likely grow because of Covid-19," Mashishi says. "Even before the pandemic, many universities had declines in enrolment for face-to-face programmes and parallel increases in uptake of their online courses. With Covid-19, we are seeing how yesterday’s disruptions can become today’s lifeguards. While some institutions once viewed online education as a threat, it has come to their rescue."

The school is unlike most others in SA, in that it has an almost equal number of public- and private-sector students. This, says Unisa, gives it a unique insight into understanding how the two operate. The school has 20 full-time faculty teaching executive education, and 23 who are visiting or part-time.

* By David Furlonger | 31 July 2020

This article first appeared in the Financial Mail on BusinessLIVE and is used by permission. You can read the original here.