Call For Proposals

Submission Deadline is Monday, October 24

 

Welcome to MOBTS Oceania, 2026! We look forward to hosting you at the CQUniversity, Melbourne Australia from 4-6 February, and warmly invite your proposals.

Conference Theme: Are We Having Fun Yet?: Improving Student and Teacher Experiences through Engaging Management and Organisational Behaviour Education

Preparing managers of the future requires teaching that engages minds and builds positive student experiences. Our theme captures the importance of engaging teaching practices such as games, role plays, simulations, and stories which bring the classroom to life and activate the imagination and learning of our students. Delegates will actively participate in leading classroom practices of peers and engage in discussion about contemporary challenges of business school education to consider, “are we having fun yet?”

Join us in Melbourne (ranked the second most fun city in the world by Time Out) in 2026 for an energetic conference that explores active, experimental, and innovative approaches to teaching, and showcases the passion and expertise of a wide range of individuals from around the world committed to high quality education in business schools. 

Participate in experiential sessions that transfer the excitement, engagement, and energy of diverse educational practices – whether physical or virtual or hybrid. Connect with like-minded business and management educators, keen to adapt and apply key innovations and learnings to their teaching contexts. This is your opportunity to show how you make learning enjoyable and meaningful while responding to the significant changes (e.g. technological, demographic, political) happening within higher education in Australia and New Zealand.

Session Inspiration

While all experiential teaching innovations are encouraged, we especially invite sessions exploring novel ways of making learning enjoyable, immersive, and meaningful. Sessions might:

• Incorporate play, narrative, or game mechanics to deepen student learning;
• Explore how fun, challenge, and engagement improve the student and teacher experience;
• Consider how to foster motivation, belonging, and curiosity in the classroom;
• Provide hands-on experiences with interactive simulations, problem-solving scenarios, or role-play exercises.

Session Format

Alongside the physical conference, MOBTS Oceania provides some form of hybrid conferencing moving forward to enable those that are not able to physically join us to participate in the conference. This format includes both presenting and attendance. Sessions can be submitted in any of the following formats:

• In-Person Only: This option means you will only be engaging in your session with people physically at the conference.
• Hybrid: This option means you will be presenting your session in-person, but also allow for simultaneous online engagement.
• Virtual: This option means you will be presenting your session virtually while also engaging with others that are both virtual and physically present at the conference.

Selecting Hybrid does not guarantee that your session will be programmed as we are seeking to provide a slimmer hybrid/virtual program than the general program itself. Additionally, submitted sessions that are slated for in-person and hybrid cannot switch to virtual without going through further review and consideration for its fit in the program.

MOBTS Oceania values innovative, interactive, active sessions with a strong preference for experiential sessions. Proposals can be in the form of interactive exercises, panel/symposium sessions, round table provocation sessions, or Professional Development Workshops (PDW). Sessions are to be 60-minutes long. A noteworthy criterion is that of audience engagement; we encourage submissions that share teaching innovations by showing and doing them. While MOBTS-Oceania is not that place for telling us about your teaching in the style of a traditional research presentation, workshops can help articulate your insights for such outlets.

All submissions are double-anonymous reviewed. Authors should expect to review three other submissions as part of the reciprocity and collegiality that is MOBTS, namely “an environment in which educators at all stages of their careers can reaffirm the relational nature of learning and the values essential to the integrity of the learning process”.

Accepted submissions will have the opportunity to be included in our Conference Proceedings with ISBN.