The future of management education

Management education today is an opportunity full of challenges. To get to a future that is sustainable in every way, we need to create an ecosystem in education to attract talent, especially as educators. I strongly believe that growth occurs with great minds entering the field with a passion. Of of the box thinking is required, and with talented personnel entering to teach, the employability of students will multiply. In my opinion, only about 20% of our professional graduates are employable. In future, we need to ensure a better percentage an look towards achieving 100% employability. This is not impossible since today, there is a responsiveness to the market needs like never before. Several innovations have taken place in terms of designing of highly specialised programs, which is only the start of a trend. We will witness in the near future highly specialised programs catering to the needs of every niche pocket possible.

Along with specialised programs, i feel experential pedagogy is going to be the order of the day. It is a well known fact that the best way to develop skill sets in students is through simulated forms of learning. They exist today, but they have to gather momentum to generate a visible difference. A great way to do this is setting up a pilot training, which can be folllowed by a learning process in which students constantly get to work on live problems of a company. This process would become easier if we saw it from the perspective of developing executives.

I envision that then 2012- 20 decade is going to be one og quality revolution just as 2000-10 was of infrastructure development in education and 1999 - 00 one of capacity creation. /if that is the case, then i think that reaching a win - win situation for the academia as well as the industry will not be difficult.

How technology has changed MBA education?

The early change came in the form of online delivery of MBA courses, allowing global students to be part of an intereactive virtual classroom. More recently, web 2.0 applications such as electronic portfolios, podcasts, wikis, and other collaborative tools allows teachers more options for both online delivery, and for traditional classroom delivery. Further, learning management systems such as Blackboard,WebCT, and moodle have enabled more efficient and effective methods of teaching and learning. Aditionally, technology tools such as clickers have dramatically changed the dynamics of teaching in the MBA classroom.

With increasing computing power in the hands of teachers and students, powerful learning simulations compete today with the traditional pedagogies such as case analysis. These simulations immerse students in complex business environments where they are focused to make challenging decisions and equally important, see the impact of their decisions. A s such, simulations can mimic the cause and effect nature of real world decision making.

All theses technology based changes are building towards a more profound tranformation in MBA education: the notion of flipped classroom. The flipped classroom is based on the recognition that traditional teaching methods such as lectures lead to passive learning and are not as effective as active learning methods that are based on interactive and collaborative work. In the flipped classroom, MBA teachers are moving lectures outside the classroom using screencasts with voice over to be listened to as homework and moving active components of learning into the classroom to be supervised for more effective learning.

'Don't chose MBA institutebased on placement package.'

How should a student decide which institute to join?
Do not fall prey to advertisements. Talk to current students and faculty members to understand an institute. One should not depend on a single ranking scale. Refer to different rankings and derive an average to gauge an institute's quality. One should never chose an institute depending on its placement package. A student bagging a really high package makes great news. But there are lakhs of students doing the same course who gets different packages.

Does the brand of an institute help in placements?
Mostly all large companies have their own internal process of rating management institute depending on their past experiences. Other firms go by rankings done by different agencies. It also largely depends on networking, which is a very important aspect of management education. If a big company has a CEO who is from X institute, its students have an advantage. Hence the general perception or branding activity of an institute will not be of much help.

Do candidates with work experience have an edge over a fresh MBA graduate?
Internationally, fresh candidates are not allowed to do an MBA, making a certain amount of work experience mandatory. However, in India, there is no such process. But a candidate with work experience will personally have an edge in understanding the course, relating to the situations and examples in the theory.