Dare the Evil: Management Education - Crying for a Change

One often hears teachers complaining about students being reluctant to attend classroom sessions. There are numerous institutions of higher learning in our country where students are enrolled only on paper and no real teaching-learning happens; teachers blame the students who in turn blame the teachers and the college management has the last laugh. This article aims to review the higher education scenario in our country with specific reference to management education.

Management literature is ripe with knowledge on how organizations align their processes to meet the needs of the customer. There is a whole body of knowledge on supply chain management which is all about delivering goods and services of customer choice at the right cost, time and quality. If education has to be viewed as a service, which it is, the concepts of supply chain management seem very relevant. Let us take an example of a beauty parlor. There were three different stages of its evolution. At the most rudimentary level, parlors had a predetermined offerings and the customer would choose a particular parlour for a particular service depending on what is available where. For example, a parlour may be good at haircuts but not so good at other services and the customer would have to switch to another one for a different service with the end purpose of looking good and that ?good? is defined by the customer. At the second level of evolution, the service provider presents many different options with a brief explanation on each along with his/her own recommendations on what would suite the physical structure of the customer etc and leave the final choice to the customer. Once decided, the service provider goes about providing the service in a dispassionate manner to give the customer that ultimate experience of feeling ?good?. Let us now look at the modern concept of ?makeover?. In this the service provider goes a step further, tries to understand the taste of the customer?s customers (relatives/friends/to be groom / bridegroom etc) and does a makeover to suite the taste, physical attributes etc. of both the parties. These business models have evolved because the customers? aspirations changed. For example, if a lady can get the same feeling of ?goodness? by herself, will she ever go to the parlour? And if she doesn?t, do the parlours have any reasons to complain? ???

Let us flip sides and look at management education now. Typically, even this has three distinct models; the first one where students enroll for a degree, do not go through the process as there may be none or very loosely defined and not meeting the desired end result. The second one is where there is some defined process with no sight on the end result and the third one, where the customer?s customer is the focus. Similarly to the analogy of the lady given above, if students can read on their own from whatever sources, pass the university exam and get a degree, will they ever come to the classroom to listen to your crap? Or, if you, as an institution provide some perceived value which however turn out to be not to the complete satisfaction of their customers (employers) will the student look for a better option? No wonder, the run of the mill institutions are shutting shop while the good ones are still making brisk business.

What makes the ?makeover??

Like a modern parlour, modern day B-Schools must set their eyes on the customer?s customer. How much ever beautiful a lady may look, unless she is liked by people of her interest, the service rendered by the parlour is all useless. Similarly, it is the employers who should be of great focus, if the institution wishes to meet the fascination of their students. That brings us to the question of what does the employers want in their potential hires? The answer is ?competence?. Wikipedia defines Competence (or competency) as the ability of an individual to do a job properly. A competency is a set of defined behaviors that provide a structured guide enabling the identification, evaluation and development of the behaviors in individual employees. Increasingly, the HRs are hiring based on competence and not based on abstract knowledge. This means, that B-Schools must first understand the competency needs of all the entry level job roles, which must then be broken down into knowledge, skill and attitude components and then go on to design the curriculum and the course. Does this sound like Greek and Latin? Perhaps yes. Some of the good practices towards achieving this end are described below.

Industry Reviewed Syllabus. Management is an evolving subject and hence changes very fast. Therefore, it may be a good practice to review the syllabus each year by a panel of industry executives at the junior / middle level. It could be a fantastic idea to involve alumni who passed out a few years back as they would have developed insight into shortfalls in their own education. This will also help in integrating the alumni, who may be a potential recruiter in the future, with the institution.

Competency Based Course Outline. Traditionally, teachers have been designing and delivering sessions to achieve knowledge based objectives. Since the focus is on competency, it may be a good idea to design and develop sessions based on competencies to be developed. Some teachers may argue that competencies include knowledge of underlying concepts which is true. Hence, sessions may either deliver a ?concept?, ?competency? or both. The folly however is, a traditional teacher with very limited experience of working in the industry may not be able to decide the right mix. Thus, whenever a course is being taken by a traditional teacher, it may be necessary that the session plans are reviewed by a junior level practicing manager. Unfortunately, teachers having taught the same subject time and again develop great insight into the theory and thus incline towards developing higher order theoretical knowledge of their students, losing sight of the practical needs at the entry level. Hence, it is imperative to bring in moderation by a junior level executive. Once again, a recently passed out alumni could be a great choice. It is often seen that experienced teachers resent this practice sighting their vast experience, ignoring the point that they may have no or limited knowledge of what the industry actually wants. In some other cases, because they may have to learn new domains to their own discomfort, they find it convenient to dissuade this practice.

Pedagogy vs Andragogy.? Pedagogy means ?leading children?. In this method, the learner is dependent upon the instructor for all learning, the teacher assumes full responsibility for what is taught and how it is learned and the teacher evaluates learning. Whereas, Andragogy relates to the ?art and science of teaching adults?, in which the learner is self-directed, responsible for his/her own learning and self-evaluates his learning. Needless to emphasis, when we change from knowledge oriented teaching to competence oriented learning, it is imperative that the teaching-learning process is student centric with ownership of learning completely on the students and teachers limiting themselves to leading the students in the right direction.

Distance Vs Classroom Learning. When so much information is available in the internet, which students can read and understand, why should they travel long distances to sit through a monologue in the classroom? Why can?t they learn online, at home? While most traditional teachers will say, ?if they could, why do they take admission in the first place? and to this my response would be, ?they take admission for the piece of paper (degree) which they know very well is not even worth cleaning the posterior?. It is the system that drives them into the colleges and not the knowledge that they get out there. There are several students who come all the way to the campus and still not sit through the sessions. Do we see a point at least now? The simple answer is, they do not find it relevant to their future life. In my personal experience, I have seen students picking and choosing sessions to attend based on what they perceive as meaningful and useful. Thus, the simple fact is any number of power point presentations right out of the textbook content is not going to interest them. They want real time learning experience.?

Enabling the knowledge Supply Chain. The domain of supply chain emerged due to the advent of internet technologies and while most of the industrial sector embraced it, education is lagging behind as usual. Typically, in a supply chain a product or service is allowed to be pulled by customers as per their choice instead of pushing it to them in undesirable forms and shapes. With virtual learning systems like Moodle being available, it is highly possible for the present day teachers to enable the knowledge supply chain. The teachers can now bring together the necessary raw information and allow their customers (students) to make a body of knowledge through their own peer group interaction and come to the classroom to tell the others as to what they discovered in the process. Experience shows that, self learning is the best learning. This enables knowledge formation and accumulation, with the teacher limiting their role to providing necessary information, moderating the classroom discussion and leading the class into other related areas for further exploration through their battery of prodding questions. Technology can be leveraged to provide self evaluation opportunities to check both concepts and competencies.?

Competency Based Session Delivery by Practicing Managers. Due to limitations of traditional teachers and teaching methods highlighted earlier, it may be a good idea to involve a practicing manager in developing at least some of the critical competencies. Attending such sessions by subject teachers will help them develop their own competencies. However, the pitfall is, such initiatives involve cost which most run of the mill institutions will view as expense and not as investment.

Frequent Industry Internships. It may be a wise idea to put the students through frequent but short internships with specific competencies to be learnt? spelt out unambiguously and evaluated by industry professionals. This will give students the look and feel of an organization which will serve a lot of good and bring about the desired seriousness into their approach.

Open Book Application Based Evaluation. Traditional teachers and the universities have always prescribed closed book examination which is more of a memory test. It serves no purpose, unless the student is able to perform a job well. Thus, it is important to test the competencies and not memory. It is suggested that exams be conducted based on practical, work related competencies with all the theoretical resources given to the students for reference. ?

Process Vs Knowledge. Under the suggested system, a student is put through a process of self learning as against cramming up pieces of information from the examination point of view. Thus, it is imperative for a student to attend sessions, participate in the learning and self evaluate. In a process oriented learning approach, the focus is on the process and unless the students go through the process completely, there is no way that they can develop competencies, though on the other hand knowledge can be assimilated through self reading. Thus, it drives the students into the classroom instead of loitering around the country side.

To conclude, it may be wise to recognize that management education is crying for change and this change has to be directed towards competency development rather than knowledge development. Unless educational institutions take note of this, management education is sure to suffer in this country. Incidentally, Goa University though under the ambit of a traditional school of thought, encourages such a system and all affiliated institutions are given academic autonomy. The university ruthlessly focuses only on the process being followed by the institutions.

Are there any takers in this country?

Source: http://daretheevil.blogspot.com/2012/10/management-education-crying-for-change.html

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