Business School Professors please check in here

[Redleg]

I thought it would be nice to see how many B-School professors hang out at DU so we can show others here that not all of us are conservative clowns. I get a bit weary responding to all the negative posts about how bad B-schools are or how bad MBAs are. Although I agree with some of the criticism, a lot of it is clearly biased and ignorant about what we do.

I am an associate professor of management specializing in Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management and a proud Democrat! I have a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior and a Masters degree in H.R. Management. I have been teaching at my current university for about 20 years now. I am hating teaching online courses and really miss face-to-face. I am thankful, though, that I can teach from home during this pandemic.

I am finding it difficult to focus on research though. It seems like I am spending much more time doing the teaching work than ever before.

[Backseat Driver]

1. I am not a B-school professor, but I'd like you to know I will look for your educated opinion

in posts about the general business climate these days. I don't think I've seen you, Redleg, in the Economy Forum. Most likely you would find me clearly biased and ignorant of what B-school professors do these days having only attained a lowly Associate Degree that included one 3 credit hour class on Organizational Management with very little mention of Human Resource Management. In those days, my program was supposed to prepare students to be Directors of their departments in various medical facilities. I was what was called an "alternative" student, and I graduated without any debt whatsoever. The year I graduated, all follow-on programs toward a BS degree were cancelled by the colleges, public and private, that had them in my State.

What do you think of Deutsche Bank's proposal that government tax work-at-home human resources, like you?, 5% more?

Of course, you'd been well prepared for face-to-face teaching, but what takes so much more time to do your lectures on-line? Do you have a TA? Audio/tech people on a Help Desk?

What are you currently researching? What serves as your laboratory? Perhaps your research has rocked your world about the ways in which organizations actually function versus what textbooks have to say about how things are supposed to work. Perhaps you are shocked that business has removed much of the "humanity" from their relationships with others. How does this square with "consumerism" and who has really been hurt by those mega-large corporations, by mergers, acquisitions, downsizing, rightsizing, re-organizations. As a proud Democrat, I hope you recognize where rule of law has lead to systemic discriminations across the board of "inequality" for which "humans" have ever less ability to access justice. Would you at least agree that corporations shouldn't hold human "corporate personhood." as per Citizens United?

Looking forward to hearing from you and the others--if anymore of your ilk lurk around here in the shadows-Got yours bookmarked!

[Redleg]

2. Some good questions...

I used to post at DU a lot during Bush's admin and then kind of layed off on the whole social media thing because it got so bad when Obama was in office. I recently started to post here again.

I have heard about the Deutsche Bank proposal but I don't know what their reasoning is. On its face it doesn't make sense to me.

We do have tech people to answer questions but faculty are responsible for their own stuff. A typical chapters worth of PowerPoints needs to be broken into multiple 15-20 minute presentations, which are recorded at home and then uploaded to our learning management system. The most time consuming part is that we have to follow a template for each week (module) and then complete several pages for each module that has links to the assignments, videos, etc. It is a good system but takes longer than with a face-to-face course. Since I am teaching 3 different courses and also designing a new course for the MBA program, I have been quite busy this semester. I think I might also have assigned too much work for the students to do online, most of which needs to be graded by yours truly. That's on me.

My main research areas have been psychological engagement at work, creative behavior in work teams, how various forms of interdependence influence cooperation and competition within work teams, and some training and learning related work. I have also written about workplace justice and employee rights.

I see my field, Organizational Behavior, as an important "humanizer" of businesses. I think we have come a long way improving the work environment for employees but clearly have some way to go, especially since the environment of work is changing so rapidly.

Thanks for your interest. I was hoping to get some more responses from other faculty but I am happy to talk to anyone about it.

[FirstLight]

3. No so much a professor, just beginning the teaching online platform

I had a course that I offered at the Community College here a few quarters on the Native American Medicine Wheel, concepts and personal applications. I was going to offer a public class at the Wellness Center in MArch, but we all know how that went!

So now I am delving into the "teach:able" platform and working on generating course content in that way. It's going to be much more detailed though, because the LOOK has to be so much more professional as well. It's not just a class for a few hippies at the community center, lol!

Any tips?