Multimedia Case Studies: Development and Use in Management Education

The paper discusses the role of multimedia case studies in management education basing on direct experiences derived from an on going E.U. project. Literature has analysed in depth the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education [Angehern, Thierry, 1996; Jonassen, 1993, Leidner, Jarvenpaa, 1995], mainly emphasising their positive or negative effects [Bowers, 1988, Van Baalen, 1999]. However few has been written about multimedia case studies and still few cases are on the market, because of both the development costs (in financial and time terms) and the immaturity of the demand. Sponsored by the European Commission, the consortium Busines-Linc has the development of 18 multimedia case studies as main objective. Pre-requisite for the case design and development was the analysis of literature about teaching and ICT in order to define a theoretical framework for multimedia case development. One key assumption leading the project is consistentwith the so called interpretive -hermeutic approach (Lee, 1994;Van Baalen, 1999) of ICT in education: technology per se is neither good nor bad in education; its use might produce positive or negative effects depending on the consistency with the learning and teaching objectives and on the interaction with the environment. After a short overview of contributions about learning processes in management education, the paper affords the relations between ICT and teaching approaches and it describes in more detail the role of case studies. Using the Sogema case experience, the authors will discuss similarities and differences in the deve lopment process of traditional and multimedia case studies and will present some first results from its use in MBA classes. Obviously generalisations are not possible given the limited research sample but some warnings and suggestions might be useful for all researchers working in this rapidly evolving field.