OREANDA-NEWS. IBM (NYSE: IBM) and EMLYON today announced a program to develop a ‘Smart Business School’ higher education environment that is capable of delivering personalized, on-demand business education on a global basis via the IBM Cloud. EMLYON will work with IBM to place educational innovation and digital entrepreneurship at the heart of its strategy, to create better outcomes for its students and a more engaging environment for its teachers. The changes in the world of education given rising globalization forces, new uses related to digital content  and higher expectations of learners and teachers is putting a pressure on higher education. In response, EMLYON turned to IBM to transform the current ways in which their students are acquiring knowledge and skills to be better prepared for the world outside the classroom.

“What we believe is genuinely new about this initiative is that it will allow us to deliver content and coaching that are absolutely relevant to each participants’ needs and aspirations, wherever they are in the world and at every step on their career path,” said Bernard Belletante, dean of EMLYON. “So, in a similar way that users today can cherry-pick their entertainment, our community will be able to choose when, where and how much it learns.”

The combination of IBM’s Big Data & Analytics capabilities and EMLYON’s in-depth teaching expertise will create a 'learning by flow' education model, providing personalized development and training that is directly relevant to the particular circumstances and requirements. Using an interactive, mobile and collaborative technology, based on the SoftLayer infrastructure from IBM, the ‘Smart Business School’ will be able to constantly react and tailor itself to each student’s changing demands and career needs.

The aim of the ‘Smart Business School’ is to be the curator of knowledge that provides continuous feedback, collaborative space and the creative connections for the community of learners and educators to evolve in parallel. Specific benefits of the collaboration include:

  • Wide range of new online and digital teaching materials and, in particular, interactive case studies
  • Effective and insightful research based on analytics, cognitive and a close working relationship between IBM’s experts and EMLYON’s academics
  • Assessment of the true effectiveness of business education, by using data analytics to measure the impact of action learning

“We are proud to support EMLYON on its path to digital transformation and to build a truly ‘Smart Business School,’ and serve as a model for other educational faculties,” said Michael King, Vice President of Global Education Industry at IBM. “This transformative effort that uses Big Data analytics delivered via a cloud-first strategy to engage the learners by personalizing their educational environment to better prepare them for the workforce.”

This cloud-based platform of the ‘Smart Business School’ will be available in EMLYON’s existing campuses in France and China, including in the campus announced in Casablanca, Morocco. The partnership will also allow on-demand ‘pop up’ campuses in key emerging markets as West Africa and industrial cities in the heartland of China.

Built on the Design Thinking methodology of IBM Studio, the new online teaching materials and services will be incrementally displayed. This new “Smart Business School” model is expected to go live by the second quarter of 2015.