Developing a Practice-Based Approach to MELT for Higher Education in Business Management

Perhaps no other discipline has experienced more persistent criticism during the last decade for irrelevance of teaching practices than business and management education. Among the many challenges faced by business educators, this paper highlights the inadequacy of the curriculum and assessment design approaches adopted by educators in developing the expertise and soft skills required by today’s managers and entrepreneurs. By synthesising practice-based theories in management science with MELT frameworks, it presents a new curriculum and assessment design framework so as to better facilitate adult learning in business education. It also shows how some limitations of current MELT frameworks for business education can be successfully overcome by adopting practice-based theories in management science. Finally, it demonstrates the applicability of the proposed framework to four major sub-disciplines in business, and opens up the opportunity for future research to further expand and evaluate its effectiveness in developing expert practitioners in the business discipline.