Content area
Full text
The Asian Tsunami struck Sri Lanka on December 26, 2004. Sri Lanka was the second worst affected country after Indonesia, and this natural disaster killed in excess of 35,000 people and displaced over 1 million. The article explores the Tsunami Disaster Management Program developed by one Sri Lankan university: the Postgraduate Institute of Management at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura. The program encouraged postgraduate students to undertake a range of recovery management projects to improve the operation of temporary camps and restore the livelihoods of tsunami survivors. The article examines the steps taken by postgraduate students to diagnose problems within the camps and implement a comprehensive range of solutions. The recovery management projects enhanced postgraduate students' managerial skills in diagnosis and analysis, planning and goal setting, leading teams and conflict resolution as well as their awareness of their social responsibilities to local communities at a time of national crisis. The article also highlights a number of lessons for other educational institutions contemplating changing their curricula to promote a stronger focus on problem-based learning.
Keywords: problem-based learning; Asian Tsunami; MBA curriculum; disaster management; managerial skills
This article explores how one Sri Lankan university, the Postgraduate Institute of Management (PIM) at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, based in Colombo, Sri Lanka, developed a Tsunami Disaster Management Program in the aftermath of the tsunami of January 26, 2004. The program provided opportunities for some 165 master of business administration (MBA) and master of public administration (MPA) students to work on relief projects for survivors of the tsunami in 69 temporary camps across Sri Lanka. The article examines this program in terms of the problem-based learning (PBL) experiences it provided Sri Lankan management students and the outcomes it achieved for the survivors of the tsunami. The article argues that alongside the considerable assistance to communities struggling in the aftermath of the tsunami, the program assisted management students to hone their leadership, planning, and problem-solving skills in a most challenging environment.
Management education is often criticized for failing to prepare students adequately to cope with real-world managerial problems. For example, the traditional MBA curriculum has been criticized for producing graduates who do not have the ability to communicate effectively, set goals, lead teams, or think intuitively (Bennis & O'Toole,...