1.Introduction
By the end of November 2022, the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT was launched, swiftly gaining popularity on social media. Within just two months of ChatGPT's exploding popularity, the entire educational system appeared to be overturned. Students embraced it with enthusiasm, while teachers, left with no choice, initiated a counterattack against ChatGPT, even resorting to extreme measures such as confiscating phones and shutting down networks. In the United States, many university professors, department heads, and administrators are making large-scale adjustments to their classes to cope with the significant impact of ChatGPT on teaching activities. Consequently, numerous universities began drafting revisions to academic integrity policies, expanding the definition of plagiarism to include "the use of generative AI."
However, many educators hold a more open attitude towards ChatGPT, believing that it has the potential to liberate many educational workers, enabling them to focus more on tasks that benefit students' long-term development. Ni Minjing, Deputy Director of the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, believes that "the emergence of ChatGPT should be seen as a major opportunity for educational reform, because if traditional educational methods do not change, education cannot be sustained by blocking ChatGPT." Wu Yonghe, a researcher at East China Normal University, stated, "Although ChatGPT faces many challenges, just like the advent of the Internet, it greatly reduces the cost for ordinary people to access knowledge and information. In the field of education, ChatGPT will not overthrow the existing educational system, and the benefits outweigh the drawbacks."
In recent years, with the sustained and steady growth of our country's economy, business studies have increasingly gained favor and attention. It has been instrumental in providing a large number of high-quality talents to industries such as finance, economics, and management, playing a crucial role in the healthy, stable, and orderly development of the national economy. However, the new industrial revolution has disrupted existing business models and accelerated the transformation of traditional business education towards intelligence and digitization. The urgency to cultivate composite talents proficient in both theoretical knowledge and practical applications for the new era has become evident. The emergence of ChatGPT not only challenges traditional business education but also presents an important opportunity to establish new paradigms in teaching, research, and practice within the field. So, what implications does ChatGPT hold for business education? Will it bring about disruptive impacts on business education? How should educators in business studies respond to such new technologies?
2.The Current Status of Business Education
What is Business Education?
To comprehend the dilemmas and challenges currently faced by business education, it is essential to first clarify what business studies entails and what constitutes business education. Business studies refers to the collective term for subjects related to business within the educational system, including economics, commerce, accounting, marketing, management, finance, statistics, and others. Its aim is to interpret the current market conditions through disciplines and analyze macro strategies used in the business world. Business education, on the other hand, is function-oriented, emphasizing professional qualities as its primary content, and aiming to cultivate business talents that meet industry demands. Business education mainly includes three aspects: teaching, research, and social service practice within the field of business. Qualified business education must possess three essential elements: a comprehensive and advanced theoretical knowledge system, scientific and effective teaching and research methods, and collaborative social practices between academia and industry.
The Dilemmas and Challenges of Current Business Education
(1) Lack of Practicality and Theoretical Depth in Business Research
Scholars are increasingly concerned about the disconnect between business teaching and research and practical application in the current development of business. At the 1st Global Forum on Chinese Management Model held at Renmin University of China in 2018, Professor Xu Shuying from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology delivered a speech that greatly shocked business school professors: "Business school professors, don't hide in ivory towers." In her speech, Professor Xu Shuying discussed how the current scientific rigor of business research has regressed due to its detachment from real-world business practices. Professor Xu proposed, "We should truly understand the challenges faced by businesses, study them in the business environment, extract their logic, propose core theories, verify these theories repeatedly, refute them if incorrect, and uphold them if validated. This is the scientific method." Subsequently, Dean Chen Fangruo from the Antai College of Economics & Management at Shanghai Jiao Tong University promoted the establishment of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Industry Research Institute on December 8, 2018. This institute introduced a new model for industry research, redefining academic understanding by using industries as a platform to study their intrinsic laws and future trends of development, breaking down disciplinary barriers, and establishing a diverse value system.
(2) Lack of Practical Scenarios in Business Education
Presently, business education suffers from a severe lack of practical scenarios and applications. Students' understanding of theory is limited to learning from textbooks, PowerPoint presentations, cases, and simple simulations. This leads to a situation where business school professors lecture confidently, but students are confused. Business education is a process of scenario-based knowledge transmission, learning, method training, and value shaping. These scenarios commonly include classrooms, laboratories, factories, and businesses. Obviously, education is not a process that can be completed by providing textual knowledge alone. It requires the construction of contextualized scenarios to foster students' interest in learning and to enhance their understanding and mastery of the subject matter.
(3) Lack of Effective Feedback in Business Education
Due to the lack of effective feedback from students, teachers find it challenging to assess students' understanding, making it difficult to tailor educational and developmental plans for each individual student. Business education is tailored to the individual student, incorporating standardized knowledge as well as personalized, non-standardized knowledge. This non-standardized knowledge can include parts of the curriculum, exercises, books, as well as specialized practices. Therefore, the key lies in integrating individual differences among students to provide customized learning content, methods, and training plans for each student, and achieving a "one-size-does-not-fit-all" approach that promotes the development and growth of every student as a core principle. Meanwhile, providing timely feedback on learning outcomes is crucial, yet current methods mainly rely on completing assignments.
3. The Significant Impact of ChatGPT+Meta on Business Education
Through its deep learning capabilities, ChatGPT has surpassed the boundaries of knowledge and abilities possessed by almost any teacher. Consequently, ChatGPT breaks the limitations of "spatiotemporal force" (time, space, and ability), and will undoubtedly change the current education model. Repetitive, technical, conceptual, and memorization-based knowledge education will inevitably be replaced by intelligent education platforms based on ChatGPT in the near future.
Because business education requires breaking through limitations in scenarios, abilities, and feedback, current ChatGPT technology provides immensely powerful capabilities and feedback for overcoming these challenges. Moreover, Meta's metaverse offers a technological foundation for constructing scenarios. Therefore, the future model of ChatGPT+Meta will completely overcome the lack of practical scenarios and the lack of variability of these scenarios in business education. Business schools will be able to actively use the "ChatGPT+Meta model" to develop relevant courses with business theory and conduct business education in a scenario-based, immersive, and gamified approach. Under this "ChatGPT+Meta model," students will encounter scenarios similar to what real companies face, learning business theory, methods, and technologies, and promptly applying these theories, methods, and technologies to real company scenarios. This learning method under the "ChatGPT+Meta model" will segmentize, standardize, and customize theoretical knowledge, providing timely feedback on learning outcomes, conducting assessment based on each student's learning situation, and designing personalized learning plans for further reinforcement.
4. The Future Outlook of Business Education
Clearly, GPT will gradually acquire the teaching and research capabilities possessed by past business school professors , and precisely because GPT possesses these abilities, it will compel business school professors to change. This change is to “get closer to practice, embrace practice, and love practice." Only by placing practice at the core can business school professors continue to have teaching and research capabilities that GPT cannot attain. The core principle here will be "stemming from practice, transcending practice, and applied in practice."
Stemming from practice. Scientific research comes from practice, and course design needs to stem from practice, delve into practice, observe phenomena, and pose questions. When practice goes on, questions arise accordingly. However, to keenly identify, articulate, and refine these questions from practice might be the foremost task for future researchers. Meanwhile, delving into practice and observing it closely enable teachers to apply practical scenarios to course design and teaching practices, so that students can quickly be aware of and understand real-world business practices, and avoid becoming disconnected from business practices upon graduation.
Transcending practice. Scientific research needs to transcend practice, and course design should transcend practice as well. Only by delving into practice, observing problems, and posing questions from practice can meaningful research be conducted. Such research needs to be refined and summarized into a relatively standardized theoretical system, which requires "transcending practice." Similarly, these standardized theoretical frameworks can be applied to course teaching, becoming course content that transcends practice and providing students with a framework of knowledge structure for addressing practical issues in the future.
Applied in practice. Scientific research should be applied in practice, and course knowledge needs to be applied in practice. "Practice is the sole criterion for testing truth," and as an applied discipline, business knowledge and research are no exception. Problems identified and posed in "stemming from practice," as well as theoretical research outcomes formed under the standards of "transcending practice," need to be ultimately "applied in practice." They should be used to guide practical activities. Only by creating value in practice can both research and teaching activities demonstrate their worth.
The future is already here, and what will shape the future direction of development of business school professors will not be our renowned experts, deans, or regulatory departments, but rather, it will come from "technology," a field completely detached from business education and research. Such new technologies will propel us towards inevitable change, devoid of any sentiment. For business school professors, time is running short; embracing technology, embracing practice, is the key to embracing tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the three major functions of business education in the past, namely "teaching," "research," and "practice," will undergo significant changes. The role of the "new type of business school professor" will evolve to become a "discussion leader of course content, leader of practical activities, shaper of business values, and thinker of management philosophy." Traditional "teaching" functions will largely diminish, and integrated, complementary, and diverse "new discussion courses" will need to be extensively developed to complement "standard course content." Traditional "service" functions will undergo significant changes, with emerging "real-world practice scenarios" activities integrated with theoretical, methodological, and technological aspects forming interactive and corroborating relationships to establish positive feedback. Traditional "research" functions will be greatly strengthened. With GPT's vast integration of existing knowledge, researches on "unknown," "exploratory," and "future-oriented" knowledge will be the core competitiveness of business school professors. The collision of thought and speculative discussions about such "unknown" knowledge and known knowledge, will become a core aspect of business school professors' future work. Particularly, in the face of the "multiple crises" currently facing the world, reshaping values conducive to long-term healthy development will become a core proposition of the future. This is also an quality that business school professors should actively strengthen and enhance.
Correspondingly, the assessment of the "new type of business school professor" will undergo significant changes. Such assessments may include social "discussion classes," field-style "practical activities," cutting-edge "exploratory research," and speculative "value discussions." In this process, theoretical learning based on GPT will be an important part. How the "new type of business school professor" designs "discussion classes," "practical activities," "exploratory research," and "value discussions" based on GPT will be the new proposition. Of course, how to integrate and coordinate, how to evolve and iterate, may require gradual exploration, gradual change, and gradual experimentation. Facing the new situation brought about by the future, we need to observe and strive, and endeavor to adapt accordingly.