Question

Is regulation part of the structure-conduct-peformance paradigm?

Answer 1

In spite of calls to examine whether there are discipline-specific implications for the design of courses in online business education (Arbaugh, 2005a, Grandzol and Grandzol, 2006), studies that investigate potential disciplinary effects have been slow in coming. Hopefully, the conceptual framework of potential disciplinary influences developed in Chapter 1 will spur further study of this topic. However, we are beginning to see some initial efforts to examine disciplinary effects in online business education. Reflecting this chapter’s repeated theme of the importance of instructors in online business education, early studies of disciplinary effects specific to business courses suggested that their effect on learning outcomes may not be as large as that of instructor experience and behaviors. A partial explanation of these relative non-findings may come from how disciplinary effects were conceptualized and operationalized. Using an analogous framework of the structure-conduct-performance paradigm from business strategy research (Arbaugh, Porter, 1980, 1981), Arbaugh (2005a) hypothesized that disciplines for which instructors could commonly obtain doctoral degrees would be more significantly associated with course outcomes. Surprisingly, he found no such ‘doctoral’ effect, perhaps because the relatively early development of the MBA program’s online offerings favored relatively experienced online instructors. Methodological issues may have influenced Drago and colleagues’ (2002) study of course effectiveness in their study of 18 MBA courses. They operationalized course content on the basis of its presentation and organization rather than by discipline. Although content was the primary predictor of learning (a possible precursor of Kellogg and Smith’s (2009) findings), they also found that instructor effects were more likely to predict perceptions of overall course effectiveness. A subsequent study of a more mature online MBA program by Arbaugh and Rau (2007) found more pronounced disciplinary effects. Their study, which used dummy coding of disciplines with finance as the referent variable, found that disciplinary effects explained 67 per cent of the variance in student satisfaction with the educational delivery medium in a sample of 40 online MBA courses. Their findings also suggest that non-quantitative courses may be better received than quantitative courses online, but whether this is due to the delivery medium, the subject matter, or both still is unclear.

In a recent study with a much larger sample, Hornik et al. (2008) examined data from 13,000 students in 167 courses from 1997 to 2003. Included in this sample were undergraduate-level courses in information systems, along with courses in disciplines outside the business school such as the hard sciences, nursing, social sciences and the humanities. Hornik and colleagues found that student grades were higher and withdrawals were lower for subjects with high paradigm development (‘hard’ disciplines), than for those with low paradigm development (‘soft’ disciplines, including information systems), and that these differences were most pronounced in advanced-level courses.

Hope, the explanation is clear to you, my friend!!!