After years of analysing the impact of technology on the bottom line in business, it seems that business schools have woken up to its potential impact on the classroom.

Warwick Business School in the UK, for example, has introduced wbsLive, one of the most advanced virtual learning environments in management education, which allows distance MBA students to interact with peers and professors, swapping information and ideas as if they were side by side rather than in different time zones. It’s proved so popular that it’s now being rolled out to the school’s alumni to bring an interactive element to its international mentoring scheme.

Other schools have sought to make learning material more accessible through the use of popular online platforms such as YouTube and iTunes. France’s HEC Paris was one of the first of the major European players to provide content to iTunes U, the education-specific area of Apple’s online store, and has since been joined by a wide range of institutions including the Saïd Business School at Oxford and Spain’s IE Business School, while EMLYON, IESE and INSEAD figure among the enthusiastic users of YouTubeEDU.

Danish leadership institute Mannaz has pushed the role of online learning to the extreme, creating a programme based on the world’s most popular virtual game, World of Warcraft. The programme’s starting point is how users work together in virtual teams with shifting roles and responsibilities to tackle challenges, and aims to apply the model to the workplaces of multinational companies. However, it seems the most intense battle is being fought, not online, but around the provision of gadgetry to MBA students.

HEC Paris kicked off competition in Europe by building a relationship with Apple which allowed it to provide all students with an iPod Touch to store and access learning materials, podcasts, FAQs and videoed lectures and to communicate with classmates and academics. “Millennials are used to getting the exact information they want, when and where they want it,” says the school’s associate dean, Valerie Gauthier, “and this enables them to do precisely that.” She also points out that research conducted at New York’s State University suggests that, for Generation Y at least, accessing information in this way can be highly effective. “Their experiments showed that students often gain more from podcasted lectures, for example, than they do from conventional classroom ones.”

Perhaps because it has only recently arrived on the continent, use of the iPad is still relatively scarce in European business schools, despite Gauthier’s description of it as a “game changer”. Switzerland’s IMD has been one of the earliest adoptors and has already deployed it on four programmes, including Orchestrating Winning Performance, where participants were provided with all course content on an iPad rather than through the traditional 1,000 pages of printed material.

“We are still in the discovery phase and pioneering new technology brings many challenges,” says Iain Cooke, IMD’s chief technology officer, “but this class of device has great potential in education.”

However, not all new technology has proved as effective or as popular in the classroom as its advocates might have hoped. A pilot programme in the US involving Darden and Foster business schools, which began in autumn 2009, saw Kindle e-readers supplied to a group of technophile students. However, by the middle of the trial 17 of Foster’s 61 participants had dropped out and 86% of the Darden sample were saying that they would not recommend the Kindle. The problem seemed to lie in the device’s file management system, which made storage and searching of case studies too difficult.

“It just didn’t have the features or user- friendliness to make it practical, let alone helpful,” stated Joe Chard, one of the Darden students involved.

So is the Kindle out of the game as far as business schools are concerned? Not according to Marcel Creemers, an MBA programme director at Nyenrode Business Universiteit in the Netherlands, who argues that Kindles, iPads, laptops and even the good, old desktop may have their place in a ‘portfolio’ approach to learning.

“Tablet PCs like the iPad will be great for tests and videos and, once they have inbuilt cameras, for virtual class meetings,” he says, “but e-readers will still be more comfortable when you’re grabbing half an hour to catch up with your reading. We shouldn’t be too keen to discount any technology now lest we throw out the baby with the bathwater. Combinations of tools are much more likely to work than a single magic bullet.”