Call For Proposals

Submission Deadline is Monday, October 12

Two Exciting New Session Types Now Offered for Submission!

Welcome to MOBTS Oceania Conference. We look forward to hosting you at UniSC Sippy Downs Campus, Queensland, Australia from 3-5 February 2027, and we warmly invite your proposals.

Conference Theme: Making Waves – Challenging the Status Quo with New Ideas

The conference aims to enhance student and teacher experiences through innovation and engagement of 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 experiential teaching practices such as games, role plays, simulations, case studies and stories which bring the classroom to life and activate the imagination and learning of students. Our theme also encourages educators to challenge established practices and introduce new ideas in response to a rapidly changing higher education landscape. Delegates will actively participate in leading classroom practices of peers and engage in discussion about contemporary challenges of business school education to consider how they can be part of “making waves” by sharing their new ideas.

Join us at UniSC on the beautiful Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia in 2027 for an energetic conference that explores active and innovative approaches to learning and teaching and showcases the passion and expertise of a wide range of individuals from around the world committed to high quality management 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, economic, demographic, political) happening within higher education in Australia and New Zealand.

Session Inspiration

Consistent with the experiential learning tradition of MOBTS, we invite sessions that engage participants actively and reflexively while challenging the status quo in management education. We encourage contributions that question assumptions, disrupt familiar practices, and generate new ways of thinking about learning and teaching. Examples might include:

• Adopt experiential methods (e.g. simulations, role‑plays, games, narratives, critical incidents, or embodied activities) to question dominant ways of learning and teaching;
• Experiment with innovative or unconventional learning designs that reimagine the roles of teacher, learner, and classroom;
• Engage participants in reflective and critical inquiry, surfacing tensions, contradictions, or power dynamics embedded in management education and organisational life, and;
• Create immersive learning experiences that provoke shifts in thinking, challenge assumptions, or unsettle “business‑as‑usual” approaches to organisation behaviour and management.

Session Format

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.

Additionally, we have two new exciting formats we are unveiling at this year’s conference:

Scholarship of Teaching & Learning Papers

For those ready to bring rigor to the conversation about teaching innovation, our new SoTL Papers format groups three related papers into a single 60-minute session, with each presenter given a 20-minute window to share findings and engage the audience in discussion. Published, unpublished, and working papers are all welcome, this is a space to test ideas, get feedback, and connect with others researching similar questions in management education. It's the perfect format for educators who want to move beyond anecdote and into evidence-based practice.

Gather Around the Expiriential Fire (Rapid-Fire Style Sessions)

New this year, Gather Around the Experiential Fire (GAEF) brings the energy of a campfire story circle to MOBTS Oceania. In this fast-paced 60-minute session, 7-8 presenters each get 7-8 minutes to share a classroom approach, activity, success, or even a failure worth learning from. No long setups, no slow burns, just the highlights that matter. GAEF is built for educators who want to share a great idea (or a lesson learned the hard way) without committing to a full session, and for attendees who want to leave with a notebook full of ideas they can use Monday morning. This rapid-fire session can be submitted to in the conference submission system and requires a 500-word extended abstract.

---

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.

We are pleased to announce that MOBTS will once against be providing scholarship opportunities within our Early Educator Institute (EEI). This scholarship includes fully covered expenses for the pre-conference workshop, the general conference, and a one-year membership to MOBTS. The EEI full-day workshop will be held on 3 February 2027. EEI is targeted at early career academics within the first five years of their management education career. The EEI is designed by leading business educators in the Australia and New Zealand region for providing developmental support to those seeking to establish their career. For more details on the EEI and the scholarships on offer, please see the MOBTS Oceania website.