Virtual Facilitation

Foreword

In March 2020 London Business School, as many other organisations across the world, faced a severe challenge due to the Covid-19 pandemic. A large part of our business (executive education) stopped abruptly, as people were simply unwilling or unable to fly to London. The crisis required us to rethink many fundamental aspects of our business – our view on teaching and learning, on how we collaborate with others, on what exactly people value from a business education – and to do it extremely quickly.

Normally London Business School is a melting pot of bright people, joining MSc and MBA programmes, seeking a state-of-the-art education, and building networks with other like-minded people from all over the world. But in March, with the Covid-19 situation escalating across the world, it was clear that we couldn't deliver on that value proposition in the same way as before.

Our first priority was to ensure that our Masters degree students could continue learning, take the necessary exams, and graduate on the agreed timetable. Which of course meant moving all teaching online. At first, there was scepticism and resistance to this move, but we persevered and it quickly became clear that ‘classroom learning’ can be recreated quite effectively in Zoom, and sometimes even for the better. Student ratings and exam grades suggest that this wholesale shift to online teaching has been a success.

To be sure, I still have some reservations about online learning. One problem is lower levels ...