Faculty in the Spotlight with Frank GOETHALS, professor in Management of Information Systems
02/15/2023
With more than 700 professors, including 186 permanent professor-researchers, IÉSEG offers to its students a high-quality learning experience, based on 4 key elements: an active, interdisciplinary learning process, focused on the acquisition of competencies, offered through customized curricula.
Each month, “Faculty in the spotlight” invites you to meet one of the School’s professors who presents their vision of teaching, their methods for transmitting their expertise and passion to students and shares their best memories and stories at IÉSEG.
This month, let’s meet Frank GOETHALS, professor in Management of Information Systems at IÉSEG.
What is your background?
I studied at the University of Leuven in Belgium where I obtained a Master’s degree in Applied Economics. After that, I was hired as a teaching assistant. While I really enjoyed that, after one year I got the opportunity to pursue a PhD, funded by the company SAP. During the final year of my PhD studies, I started teaching again, at the University of Brussels this time. I also taught at the KULeuven in the postgraduate program at that time. One day, I was talking to a colleague over there who mentioned “a great School in Lille, in the North of France, who is growing and hiring professors”: IÉSEG. While I had been offered a Post-Doctoral position at the KULeuven, funded by the prestigious FWO, IÉSEG seemed to be an ambitious School, so I decided to apply and I joined IÉSEG in 2007. I was the only permanent professor in Information Systems at that time. Later I became Head of the Management of Information Systems track at IÉSEG and more recently, from 2017 till 2021, I took the role of Head of the Management department. That department consisted of more than 60 people and covered many different disciplines such as information systems, operations management, human resources management, innovation, entrepreneurship, strategy, CSR, etc. It was thus a fairly complex department to manage, and given the growth of the school we ended up splitting it into four different departments.
Could you tell us more about your area of expertise and research?
When it comes to research I am interested in threats – in that information technologies (IT) can both create and mitigate threats. As an example, during the COVID period, people used zoom to overcome the challenges imposed by the pandemic. So, we can say that in that case, IT allowed to mitigate the threat. But IT can also create threats, for instance related to job automation. Nowadays, my research mostly focuses on green IT, which implies three aspects: the greening of IT (e.g. using computers that consume less electricity), the greening by IT (e.g. I’m not going to fly somewhere to have a meeting with someone, instead I’m going to use Zoom to have this meeting), and the greening of IT use (e.g., I will lower the quality settings on Netflix so that less energy is needed to transmit movies).
From a teaching viewpoint, I concentrate on all kinds of different technologies. I teach a class on digital innovations, where I talk about technologies such as blockchain, tokenization and DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) for example. It is a broad class that allows us to investigate the way companies can take advantage of these technologies.
Have you noticed an evolution in your teaching methods overtime?
There’s been a huge evolution. As I mentioned earlier, I started teaching at the University of Leuven and the University of Brussels, where my teaching style was appreciated. I basically used to enter the room and speak for two hours while students were taking notes. When I joined IÉSEG in 2007, I initially kept the same pedagogical methods, and I quickly realized that it was pretty much… a disaster! My teaching clearly did not meet the IÉSEG students’ expectations at all. So, I had a meeting with the former Head of Bachelor programs at IÉSEG, who gave me all kinds of tips to succeed with IÉSEG students. The discussion was very constructive and I had a better understanding of what would work or not with my new audience. I needed to provide a much more interactive and activating course. I thus adapted my teaching and that was a success. After many years of continuous redesign, I won a Teaching Excellence Award in 2021. Overall, I am definitely in favour of this approach, which allows us to connect much more with the students. They can really contribute to the class and we (professors) can also learn from their stories.
Does IÉSEG’s Vision – empowering changemakers for a better society – fit with your values?
The answer is absolutely yes! I would say it’s a natural fit between my research, my classes and the School’s Vision. I really feel in line with this Vision and I feel part of a community. Environmental issues and ethics have always been areas of interest in my courses. Indeed, during classes we deal with all kinds of topics related to that. For instance, regarding ethics, we take an interest in third-party tracking, planned obsolescence and the environmental footprint of cryptocurrencies and of AI.
What do you like most about being a professor at IÉSEG?
I definitely appreciate the international dimension of the School, even though I also like the French professors of course! I’ve seen other institutions where the majority of the faculty are locals, with only a small group of international professors who are often not well integrated. Here at IÉSEG, the exchanges are very rich because you can hear the point of view from many different people coming from different countries and cultures, and that gives a much broader perspective. Several universities now refuse to hire their own PhD students because they consider that coming from the same institution means looking at the same things the same way. At IÉSEG, we always have new researchers coming in who bring different research interests, methodologies and theories.
What are your strengths as a teacher, according to your students?
Based on the evaluations I’ve received, I can say students perceive my teaching style as structured, clear, engaging and passionate. The latter is very important when you’re teaching Information Systems because students usually don’t join a school of management to learn about IT. That means that we, Information Systems professors, have to go the extra mile to keep the students’ engaged. Therefore, I invest a lot of energy while teaching. I also use a lot of real-life cases and examples so that the topic becomes something concrete and not just abstract. I also push them to think critically and go more in depth by challenging them, and I provide them with constructive feedback on their reports and presentations. This is a lot of work but it is worth the effort!
Do you use any other innovative pedagogical methods to teach?
I’ve taken on a new challenge this year: I am now the coordinator of the Excel training in the 1st Bachelor. There is a big difference in terms of level in Excel among new students. Indeed, some students already know quite a bit and learn very fast, whereas others don’t know Excel at all and need more time in their learning. Therefore, we work with online videos and I’ve created exercises and regular tests related to these videos. In my opinion, what’s innovative is that I’ve used Python, a programming language, to program an engine that generates different Excel tests for every student. The 1300 students in this class each get 5 tests during the semester to motivate them to work regularly. Each of those 6500 tests is different to avoid any cheating. We just want to make sure that all students acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to use Excel efficiently. It is also important that the students receive their feedback quickly, so I also programmed an engine to automate the grading of those 6500 Excel files, and students get their grades and feedback soon after the test. Students seem to be motivated to work hard for the class and learn a lot.