By Jeroen Rombouts, Professor of Information Systems, Decision Sciences and Statistics

Jeroen Rombouts received the special jury award (along with Florence Cavelius).

I would like to express my gratitude for this great award from the ESSEC Foundation. As data and analytics research professor and holder of the Strategic Business Analytics Chair sponsored by Accenture, it is a great honour to be rewarded with a teaching prize.

Teaching post pandemic will need to incorporate the positive aspects of online learning that ESSEC professors had to master in a few weeks rather than a few years.

What have we learned as professors? Neither students nor professors appreciate fully online taught courses, the main reason being the lack of interaction. However, in the opposite offline only pre pandemic teaching misses the advantage of rewatching recorded sessions, obliges synchronous assimilation of content, and often requires several external lecturers for the same course. In fact, it is striking that the latter format was about the same for the past two millennia!

From 2021 onwards, ESSEC has the unique opportunity to incorporate the advantages of online and asynchronous teaching. Students can watch asynchronous videos, several times if needed to prepare on campus lectures that can be less frequent. These lectures can foster interaction among peers and with ESSEC Faculty.

I experimented this kind of combined pedagogy for the Refresher in Statistics, and this was very well appreciated by students, with heterogeneous profiles.

The future of teaching is definitely now!