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'Learning to Learn' is the Undaunted Key toward Progress

Prof. Janat Shah
Director-Indian Institute of Management - Udaipur
Friday, February 27, 2015
Prof. Janat Shah
India's history of the past 50 years has witnessed the glorious inception of more than 1760 B-Schools. This unprecedented proliferation of the rising number of B-Schools is due to the freedom for business start-ups in the country. Many entrepreneurs with the objective of making quick money have started many B-Schools that lack good quality teaching, training and staff. Despite all rankings and various other methods of listing B-Schools, the best in India is not the best internationally. The top end B-Schools are only comparable to top 20 in the world. The Indian B-School sector faces challenges in research and lack of global talent pool.

Many institutions are still unable to fulfill the mandatory changes imposed on them, such as upgrading of the curriculum by the universities or the board of management studies. B-Schools today need to increase the amount of efforts put into research. This is solely because academy institutions build their repute due to the research they perform. Pertaining to the lack of global talent pool in classrooms, it is important that a classroom of a B-School must represent global talent pool. Due to various novel programs the latter part of the challenge could be met due to different foreign students coming in. The quality of B-Schools must be improvised rather than increasing their numbers. This is the current need of the hour.

The current Management Education Sector is not managed up to the requirements and demands when it comes to upgrading the Indian Management Education sector to the International class. There is a need for a much more professional management of the sector. There must be a curriculum framed that reflects state of the art knowledge and ensures the eccentricity that is brought into the program. As going by listing and ranking, Top 30 to 40 B-schools today do a commendable job in these terms but descending the graph, quality declines. An area where our country's B-Schools do a remarkable job is in analytics, but areas where we lack are developing leadership, executioner skills and the like. These issues must be brought into the curriculum as well through a set of activities for students to develop these skills. Student clubs can contribute to the same.

In today's world everything taught is connected to the industry, therefore a close connect with the industry is very important. In the curriculum design it should be a collaborative effort where a senior faculty member must be invited to indulge in student learning as a faculty. Any program must have the right blend of concepts, academics, syllabus, case studies, and industry interface exposure. It is important that periodically in courses industry leaders must ascend upon teaching daises to bestow industry specific knowledge to the students. If India has to deepen its research, then industry must be willing to share data with the academic institutions. Not only industries but institutes must also be willing to collaborate with organizations in order to partner with them in the long run by preparing and modifying their teaching according to what is expected in the industry.

Faculty in an institution forms its spine. They are the outmost aspects of an academic institute that directly come in terms with and affect a student. The role of faculty in any institution is undeniably pivotal. The core contribution of any institute is by the faculty for lectures, live projects, case studies and the like; but the initial start must be carried forward by the professionals who link the institute with the industry and help receive apt data and information.


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