An invitation and advice on responding to the call for papers of the
Management and Organizational Behavior Teaching Society
Are you excited or intimidated by academic conferences and associated activities? What drives you: sharing research, hunting for insights and ideas, public speaking, ticking the box for AP&D and promotions, seeing new places, meeting old friends and making new ones, building a coalition to lead some change for good, and/or maybe something else?
Being an education-focused academic, I can’t resist immersing myself in numerous Learning and Teaching conferences every year. But I honestly don’t remember thinking about my “why” until research from my peers, Dewa Wardak, Elaine Huber and Sandris Zeivots hit me with questions about professional development (Wardak et al, 2022). I realised that visualising my ideas as a conference presentation and reflecting on the “so what” impact of my teaching, is my way of learning from innovating and co-creating with students that I am clearly addicted to.
Last year, thanks to Sandra Seno-Alday, I discovered the Management and Organizational Behavior Teaching Society (MOBTS). MOBTS is a global society dedicated to enhancing the quality of teaching and learning in the aforementioned fields. Its focus is on developing sustainable, effective and engaging teaching methods that enhance student learning and prepare them for the challenges of the modern business world. MOBTS organises conferences and publishes two journals: the Journal of Management Education, focusing on teaching scholarship, and Management Teaching Review, offering practical teaching resources, fostering a collaborative and supportive community for professionals in these fields. I was so impressed by the collaborative and thought-provoking atmosphere of these conferences, that I presented at two of them this year.
It is my experience that I want to share with those who are wanting to amplify their teaching and learning knowledge transfer. How about six pieces of advice?
1. Read the description of MOBTS session formats
At the courtship stage of my relationship with this Society, while entertaining the idea of becoming a part of it (given how time poor the academic mob is), I loved how open the MOBTS conference agenda was and how much it inspired creative thinking. Sure thing, you could express your interest in running a traditional Professional Development Workshop or present your Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Research, but I was more intrigued by Experiential Exercises and Case Studies, Roundtable Provocations and Symposia/Panels (both full papers and extended abstracts were allowed).
2. Team up
Inviting your peers and students to collaborate on a presentation for MOBTS will give you an incentive to learn from their experience in a structured manner. It will not only speed up your submission and make it more polished, but it will enhance your teaching practices even if your proposal is not accepted.
Where did I land? The first call for papers was from the Oceania’s “regional venture” of the Society (MOBTS Oceania) for a conference which was conveniently scheduled to take place in Sydney in early 2023, hosted by UNSW. I brought together a team of passionate educators from two Australian Business Schools and engaged students to collaboratively reflect on the student-educator experiences with the Students-as-Partners (SaP) metaphor. We called our proposed interactive session “SaP o’clock”. It received a lot of helpful and encouraging feedback from many reviewers. I had heaps of fun on the day of our 90-min long session discovering how the impact of good teaching can be amplified by the explicit alignment with the SaP guidance in comparison to complying with the Students-as-Customers motto typical to our era of marketisation of education. And you bet the student voice that sounded in the room stole the thunder for all the right reasons.
3. Write the proposal
Even if you haven’t finished polishing the final details of your teaching innovation or exercise, you might find it useful to outline your thinking as a proposal for one of MOBTS sessions. This is especially true in the case of addressing a burning educational challenge in rapidly changing circumstances. I ended up putting the assessment description I developed for IMOBTS as instructions for my students in Semester 1, 2023.
Still excited after my first conference experience and intrigued by the havoc that the then-2.5 months old AI baby ChatGPT3 was about to unleash on our classrooms, I saw another MOBTS call for papers. This time it was for IMOBTS, hosted by the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, UK, which closed out the MOBTS 50th anniversary year celebration (yep, it’s a Society with a history). I challenged myself to submit a proposal for another interactive session, committing to reflect on my ride-or-die upcoming experience of redesigning the capstone for the Management and Leadership major assessments with the aim of tackling the significant threat the emergence of ChatGPT3 brought to the integrity of traditional essay-style assessments and reports. My proposal received some great thought-provoking feedback from reviewers and my Semester 1, 2023 became a learning by doing exercise in the true spirit of Kolb’s experiential learning cycle.
4. Be brave
Don’t obsess over presenting only your “best side” of success. As I keep saying to students in my classes on leadership and communication: if you never fail – you do not challenge yourself enough. MOBTS values learning from failures. Your experience and bravery will be celebrated.
I shared my redesign experience of “inviting” Chat GPT to our class business not as usual “routine”. Semester 1, 2023 was a battle for many institutions if they should embrace or forbid ChatGPT as a part of students’ learning journey.
The University of Sydney Educational Innovation team was ahead of the game with developing and updating recommendations of how to use this cutting edge tech for the benefit of students who would be expected to know how to navigate AI in the workplace. Still, in March 2023, there were very few academics who risked experimenting with it in the classroom, so my experience was very valuable to learn from. It sounds like a no-brainer now, but in March-May 2023 I was genuinely amazed how much less students were motivated to play with a new shiny tech toy everyone was talking about in comparison to building more and more human to human connection that the new design enabled. And my key lesson was that for students to get the most out of AI, you need to meticulously embed it as series of compulsory activities or part of the assessment. I brought to me IMOBTS online session Student voices, peer observations and the University of Sydney two-lane approach to using AI in the classroom. It sparked helpful discussions that we continued with some of the participants after the session.
5. Present internationally
Use the opportunity to present internationally and meet new people, even if you cannot travel. I was teaching an intensive at the time of the conference, but MOBTS is well-equipped to run hybrid or fully online sessions.
Specifically, MOBTS Conferences allow you to present in a variety of formats including in person only, virtual, hybrid presenters (allowing co-presenters to be virtual), and hybrid attendees (presenters are in person, but attendees are online).
6. Participate!
If you are still not sure of what to expect, you have an excellent opportunity to join the MOBTS Oceania in beautiful Queensland as a participant for a brilliant theme of ‘living your best teaching experience’ (hosted by the University of Queensland, January 30 to February 1, 2024).
What’s next? To the best of my knowledge, there are two MOBTS calls for papers for 2024 you still have time to submit – or you can plan ahead. For your convenience, I summarise the call from the MOBTS websites, learn more by clicking on the links:
MOBTS 51st Annual Conference (Salem State University in Salem, Massachusetts)
Conference dates: June 11th – 14th, 2024.
Submissions deadline: Monday, January, 8th
Conference theme: “New Ways of Working”, invites us to explore how the evolving landscape, shaped by the pandemic, AI advancements, and changing employee expectations, impacts management teaching, given that we have a) unknown skills to teach, and b) are not immune to such changes ourselves.
International MOBTS (James Cook University, Singapore)
Conference Dates: June 27 – 30, 2024
Submission Deadline is Monday, January 22, 2024
Conference Theme: “Future Frontiers: Integrating AI & Modern Technologies in Management Education”. A self-explanatory wording that doesn’t, however, make the topic any less challenging and exciting.
MOBTS is my mob, and it can be yours too!