Meeting new challenges in higher education: Two educational activities and an interdisciplinary competency framework

Abstract

This article explores how educational institutions are faced with changes in the modern global business environment, and how this leads to a need for changes in curricula for business schools and information systems schools. Most of academia still uses a strict disciplinary model of education resulting in a high degree of specialization within each discipline while the modern business environments require knowledge workers who can address problems that cut across disciplines on an increasingly global scale. Research papers and governmental reports call for more emphasis on particularly three interdisciplinary topics; 1) competencies in globalization issues, 2) communication/working in team, and 3) information literacy. The academic disciplines of business education and information systems education in particular have received much attention in this respect with several calls for change. How to bring about such a change is, however, still an open question. Currently many universities are looking into their educational offerings in order to adapt to the new situation. This paper proposes to address this issue in two ways; by suggesting two new educational activities and by proposing a new educational interdisciplinary competency framework to guide curriculum development when including interdisciplinary topics.