Die MED (Management Education and Development)-Sparte der renommierten “Academy of Management” (AOM), der Berufsvereinigung für Wissenschaftler aus den Bereichen Management und Organisation, hat kürzlich den „Global Forum Best Paper“-Award an Rainer Winkler, Matthias Söllner und Jan Marco Leimeister verliehen. Die AOM ist eine mit rund 20.000 Mitgliedern weltweit tätige, im Jahr 1936 gegründete, traditionsreiche Forschungsvereinigung mit Sitz im Bundesstaat New York in den USA. Sie ist zudem Herausgeberin einer Reihe von höchstgerankten A+- und A-Journals im Bereich Management.

Die drei Wissenschaftler der Universitäten St.Gallen und Kassel haben diesen Award für ihr Paper „Improving Students’ Problem-Solving Skills with Smart Personal Assistants“ erhalten, in welchem sie die Potenziale Smarter Persönlicher Assistenten (SPA) beim Einsatz durch Bildungsinstitutionen wie Universitäten untersuchen. Das Paper von Rainer Winkler, Prof. Dr. Matthias Söllner und Prof. Dr. Jan Marco Leimeister wurde von den AOM-MED-Reviewern als das beste Paper für diesen durch die französische Elite-Hochschule Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) gesponserten MED „Global Forum Best Paper“ Award ausgewählt. Die offizielle Award-Zeremonie und Würdigung dieser Leistung durch die AOM/MED wird auf Grund der aktuellen Situation diesmal online stattfinden.

Anbei der Abstract dieses Papers:
Tomorrow’s organizations need employees who are able to deal with rapid changes and solve non-routine problems. Gaining problem-solving skills is considered the number-one skill for future employees to succeed professionally. Predominant learning theories agree that the most effective way to gain these skills is for everyone to receive individual support by their own private tutor. For educational institutions such as high schools and universities, this is often not possible due to financial and organizational restrictions. A new emerging class of information technology – specifically Smart Personal Assistants (e.g., Google’s Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa) – has the potential to address this problem by interacting with students in a manner comparable to human tutors because of its high degree of adaptability, interactivity and accessibility. Even though there exists a growing body of research about the design and use of Smart Personal Assistants for learning, empirical evidence of their ability to help students improve their problem-solving skills is still scarce. Grounded on technology-mediated learning theory, this study uses a mixed-method approach consisting of two field quasi-experiments and one post-experiment focus group discussion at a business high school and a vocational business school with a total of 90 students to measure the effect of using Smart Personal Assistants on acquiring problem-solving skills. The empirical results show that students in the experiment classes acquired significantly more problemsolving skills than those in the control group mainly explained by changes in their learning process. The findings provide empirical evidence for the importance of using new emerging Smart Personal Assistants on general skill development, and specifically on problem-solving skill development. Moreover, our work can guide educational institutions and educators in designing and implementing Smart Personal Assistants in their own learning environments.