{"id":140322,"date":"2023-02-15T18:04:48","date_gmt":"2023-02-15T17:04:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ieseg.fr\/?post_type=news&#038;p=140322"},"modified":"2025-09-10T11:40:53","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T09:40:53","slug":"faculty-in-the-spotlight-frank-goethals","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/www.ieseg.fr\/en\/news\/faculty-in-the-spotlight-frank-goethals\/","title":{"rendered":"Faculty in the Spotlight with Frank GOETHALS, professor in Management of Information Systems"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright size-full is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ieseg.fr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/Faculty-in-the-Spotlight-c.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-124358\" width=\"241\" height=\"241\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.ieseg.fr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/Faculty-in-the-Spotlight-c.png 380w, https:\/\/www.ieseg.fr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/Faculty-in-the-Spotlight-c-300x300.png 300w, https:\/\/www.ieseg.fr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/Faculty-in-the-Spotlight-c-150x150.png 150w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 241px) 100vw, 241px\" \/><\/figure><\/div>\n\n<p><strong>With more than 700 professors, including 186 permanent professor-researchers, I\u00c9SEG 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Each month, \u201c<strong>Faculty in the spotlight<\/strong>\u201d invites you to meet one of the School\u2019s 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 I\u00c9SEG.<\/p>\n<p><strong>This month, let\u2019s meet Frank GOETHALS, professor in Management of Information Systems at I\u00c9SEG.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ff9900;\"><strong>What is your background?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>I studied at the University of Leuven in Belgium where I obtained a Master\u2019s 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 \u201ca great School in Lille, in the North of France, who is growing and hiring professors\u201d: I\u00c9SEG. While I had been offered a Post-Doctoral position at the KULeuven, funded by the prestigious FWO, I\u00c9SEG seemed to be an ambitious School, so I decided to apply and I joined I\u00c9SEG 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 I\u00c9SEG 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.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ff9900;\"><strong>Could you tell us more about your area of expertise and research?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>When it comes to research I am interested in threats \u2013 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 <strong><u>of<\/u><\/strong> IT (e.g. using computers that consume less electricity), the greening <strong><u>by<\/u><\/strong> IT (e.g. I\u2019m not going to fly somewhere to have a meeting with someone, instead I\u2019m going to use Zoom to have this meeting), and the greening of <strong>IT use<\/strong> (e.g., I will lower the quality settings on Netflix so that less energy is needed to transmit movies).<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Have you noticed an evolution in your teaching methods overtime?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s 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 I\u00c9SEG in 2007, I initially kept the same pedagogical methods, and I quickly realized that it was pretty much\u2026 a disaster! My teaching clearly did not meet the I\u00c9SEG students\u2019 expectations at all. So, I had a meeting with the former Head of Bachelor programs at I\u00c9SEG, who gave me all kinds of tips to succeed with I\u00c9SEG 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.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ff9900;\"><strong>Does I\u00c9SEG\u2019s Vision \u2013 empowering changemakers for a better society &#8211; fit with your values?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>The answer is absolutely yes! I would say it\u2019s a natural fit between my research, my classes and the School\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ff9900;\"><strong>What do you like most about being a professor at I\u00c9SEG?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>I definitely appreciate the international dimension of the School, even though I also like the French professors of course! I\u2019ve 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 I\u00c9SEG, 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 I\u00c9SEG, we always have new researchers coming in who bring different research interests, methodologies and theories.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ff9900;\"><strong>What are your strengths as a teacher, according to your students?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Based on the evaluations I\u2019ve received, I can say students perceive my teaching style as structured, clear, engaging and passionate. The latter is very important when you\u2019re teaching Information Systems because students usually don\u2019t 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\u2019 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!<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ff9900;\"><strong>Do you use any other innovative pedagogical methods to teach?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve taken on a new challenge this year: I am now the coordinator of the Excel training in the 1<sup>st<\/sup> 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\u2019t know Excel at all and need more time in their learning. Therefore, we work with online videos and I\u2019ve created exercises and regular tests related to these videos. In my opinion, what\u2019s innovative is that I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With more than 700 professors, including 186 permanent professor-researchers, I\u00c9SEG offers to its students a high-quality learning experience, based on 4 key elements: an active, interdisciplinary learning process, focused on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":140353,"menu_order":0,"template":"","news-category":[297],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v19.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Frank GOETHALS, professor in Management of Information Systems<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This month, let\u2019s meet Frank GOETHALS, professor in Management of Information Systems at I\u00c9SEG since 2007.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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