By Dr. Anupam Narula, Professor of Marketing at Amity School of Business, Amity University, Noida, India
India moves towards becoming a knowledge economy and society, more and more Generation-Zstudents are likely to aspire for higher education.The quality management business schools must aim to develop good, thoughtful, well-rounded, and creative professionals. It must enable an individual to study one or more specialized areas of interest at a deep level, and also develop character, ethical values, intellectual curiosity, scientific temper, creativity and spirit of service towards society. It must prepare management students for more meaningful and satisfying lives and work roles leading to economic independence.
Do you think that Indian business schools are genuinely ready to revamp their curriculum framework as per the new National Education Policy 2020?
Premier business schools in India are strong on preparing students for analytical skills i.e. on ‘Knowledge Component’ (facts, frameworks and theories), but are poor in ‘Practice Component’(Doing and Execution) and ‘Being Human’ component, (values and ethical boundaries, commitment to organization, optimism, attitudes & beliefs towards work, and empathy) which are heart of practical and experiential management.
Knowledge component means grooming the analytical skills of students through facts, frameworks and management theories. The business schools groom and prompt them to have tunnel vision making them to study large pool of analytical core courses in the first year of MBA programme. The loss extends far beyond the classroom as their employer’s sense during internships that freshly minted MBA’s from premier business schools are ill equipped to tackle complex and unquantifiable issues of the organization and the main culprit is less than relevant MBA curriculum.
Practice component means executing the policies effectively by recognizing the organizational realities. It ispractical execution approach and involves people management, team work, and perspective building. This can be achieved through ‘Action learning labs/track trips’ focussed on specific subject areas like Sustainability, Technology, Entrepreneurship and Models of business and innovation (STEM) or type of company/ geographic region to facilitate hands on experience away from the campus for two to three weeks. This will build real world critical and higher order thinking skills in management graduates to sense opportunities and define problems in the corporate world and help graduates to realise their true potential to map their areas of interest and likings with the skill set demanded by the market.
‘Being Human’ component means understanding the moral principles to create balance between a career and commitment to organisation, adaptability, developing a positive attitude and belief towards work and integrative thinking approach.This can be achieved through additional immersive programme of two to three week experience that specifically focuses on the themes like business ethics, team work, social responsibility, leadership&corporate accountability, social innovation for improving the society and world and mainly the integration of curricula across these fields. This is where the challenge for business schools lies. These components are not easy to develop in a classroom setting and call for more experiential methods of learning.Business school graduates must be sensitive enough to the social impact of business & ethical standards that are expected from them by their employer’s in strategy development & execution.
In 1927 Alfred North Whitehead, British philosopher and mathematician addressed to the American Association of the Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) that “Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts. The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations”.
Today Whitehead’s observation is more relevant than ever as Indian business schools are to regain their relevance in the corporate world, they have to come out from silos culture and understand the reality that business management is not a technical discipline like pure sciences but a profession that is oriented towards practice and need of clients.Profession always integrates knowledge and practice along with commitment to the human good. Business is a profession in which imagination and experience are vital and ought to be central to business education.
The New Education Policy 2020 has pointed out the five key elements for professional management education providers as follows:
- The main thrust is to move to vibrant multidisciplinary institution of teaching, business research and community engagement. It strongly emphasizes to develop active research communities across management disciplines including cross-disciplinary research, and increase resource efficiency at both material and human front.Professional management education providers are required to integrate their curricula across different academic management domains which include economics, psychology, philosophy, sociology, mathematics, commerce, technology and foreign languages.Furthermore, influence of technology on human endeavours is expected to erode the silos culture between professional management education and other disciplines too.
- To promote creativity, institutions and faculty will have the autonomy to innovate on matters of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment within a broad framework. Engaging pedagogy and continuous assessments will have an increased emphasis on communication, discussion, debate,research, and opportunities for cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary critical thinking.The continuous assessment methods must be designed to continuously improve learning and test the application of knowledge.Practice oriented projects in the areas of business management, community engagement and service, environmental education, and value-based education will be considered an integral part of a holistic management education.
- The Choice Based Credit System (CBCS) will be revised for instilling innovation and flexibility. Business schools shall move to a criterion-based grading system that assesses student achievement based on the learning goals for each programme, making the system fairer and outcomes more comparable. This will lead to move away from high-stakes examinations towards more continuous and comprehensive evaluation.
- Research/teaching collaborations and faculty/student exchanges with high-quality foreign institutions will be facilitated, and relevant mutually beneficial MOUs with foreign countries will be encouraged. Furthermore, research collaboration and student exchanges between Indian business schools and global management institutions will be promoted through special efforts. Credits acquired in foreign universities will be allowed, as per the requirements of each business school, to be counted for the award of a degree.
- The new system envisioned by this policy will foster the overall culture of empowerment and autonomy to innovate and aim to develop all capacities of business professionals -intellectual, aesthetic, social, physical, emotional, and moral in an integrated manner. Imaginative and flexible curricular structures will enable creative combinations of disciplines for study, and rigorous specialization in a chosen field or fields with multiple entry and exit points, thus, removing currently prevalent tunnel vision and creating new possibilities for holistic development of well-groomed professionals as required by industry 4.0.
This indicates that Indian business schools must become flexible and innovative in order to develop holistic and multidisciplinary curricula, creative pedagogy and continuous learning assessments outcome. The new blend of knowledge development, Practice robust solutions to problems and also building character by being human, all these components are required in designing the innovative and creative criterion based management courses in the curriculum framework.
In order to achieve these goals Indian business schools need all aspects of curricula and pedagogy to be reoriented and revamped to develop a holistic business professionals who can have a balanced Intellectual and emotional quotient to face the life challenges as well as present day challenges of industry 4.0.
Corporate Comm India (CCI newswire)
