December 19, 2013

Bond University in The Gold Coast, Australia (2013)

To say that the inaugural RMLE Unconference was a resounding success would be a bit of an understatement.

It’s what happens when you take good friends, who are also enthusiastic and engaged academics, and you come up with a very cool idea about how to bring people together to move research forward in innovative and creative ways using their ideas, an open, organic, and flexible framework, and a comfortable setting.

We call it the Research in Management Learning and Education (RMLE) Unconference and we think it’s pretty fantastic. If you watched the video or read through the testimonials on our homepage, you’ll see that other people think it’s fantastic too.

Our 2013 Unconference was held at Bond University on the Gold Coast of Australia https://bond.edu.au/.

Ken Brown, then editor of the Academy of Management Learning and Education (AMLE), Jon Billsberry, then editor of the Journal of Management Education (JME), and Amy Kenworthy and George Hrivnak, both at Bond University and associate editors and/or board members of AMLE and JME, pulled this event together in less than three months. Looking back, we’re not really sure how we did it, but we did and we couldn’t have asked for a better group of people who joined us for the event or a more productive and exciting time together.

We had 37 attendees at the event from 5 different countries (4 continents) with the Australian faculty members coming from 15 different Australian universities. We were overwhelmed by the enthusiasm and contributions of each of the participant contributors.

The discussion prompts that were used for the first session and continued on as the foundation for the entire day’s discussions were:
(1) A shift toward transformational student learning processes
(2) Student engagement with the external world
(3) Cross-cultural and multicultural issues
(4) Challenging assumptions & the status quo
(5) Technology-based challenges and innovations

If you are interested in reading through the QIC submissions for our inaugural event, please feel free to read through the 2013 RMLE Unconference Proceedings document attached to the link below.

An overwhelming thank you to Ken Brown, Jon Billsberry, the Bond Business School team, and all of the participant contributors for believing in this event. Without their contributions and support, the RMLE Unconference wouldn't exist today.