Reinventing Business Education

Most of us as a B School instructors are extremely good in information dissemination by lecturing during the normal class where students spend their time in either noting the contents or are busy with their gadgets sitting in the back row.

I empathise with my students as it is extremely difficult for them to switch from one subject to another day after day. It should not come to us as a surprise as to why the retention rate amongst students is gradually falling down drastically

STOP and think!

We must take the onus of this issue and try reinventing our way of delivering and lecturing, if we really want to justify the nobility of teaching profession.

Lot has been said about integrated education, but still we fail to realize the true potential of it, mainly because it takes lot of effort on part of the instructors in making the entire business education process integrated thereby delivering and creating environment conducive for learning.

Just like business does not operate in silos, so is the process of delivering the knowledge about business functions. Every aspect of business education is integrated and interconnected. The elements of Integrated Business Education can be enumerated as follows:

Connect Reference to Context first.

We often don't know what we don't know and the same goes with the students they don't care about learning until they realize that they have a weakness and gain a desire to fix that weakness. This means evaluating the student, identifying their limitations, and tapping their desires to address the gap is the first and the foremost job that we have before we actually start the session.

We must spend our discretionary time and effort in understanding the student psychology and then according try to customize the delivery pattern that fulfils purpose amongst the mass group of students.

Though it is difficult but when we do so we tend to connect and bond with our students well and they start respecting us as the famous saying goes – “The

only way to get others interested is by getting interested in them”. I call this CONNECT by establishing REFERENCE and then move on to CONTEXT.

Spend more time in building up the reference, and only then the delivery of context becomes extremely easy and the response from the students increases significantly.

Visualization

We should make an effort while delivering and sharing information amongst the students in a way that they can visualize and build mental maps that they can retrieve to draw conclusions and act on them. We humans have unlimited potential and power to imagine.

Further I feel if could possibly add some emotional appeal to our content than it is even better as our memory is improved if there are strong positive or negative emotions tied to what is learned.

Edutainment help us in connecting our content with entertainment to deliver and create some wonderful learning experiences. We should avoid jumping to conclusions, and allow students to explore the possibilities. There is NO perfect answer to a problem, it all depends how you look at the problem, and students sees much differently than the way we do. We must encourage our students to explore experiment and enhance their learning experience where our job shifts from main stage hero to that of a facilitator.

Don’t Broadcast but Discuss

Students literally learn while talking things out. Introvert learners often benefit from listening to the discussion, internalizing it, and spending time thinking through their own reactions. We must ensure that the mechanics of our discussions allow students to “think” and reconnects

Discussion requires openness and preparation one cannot enter into discussion without preparation, hence we must keep ourselves well informed about the developments and happenings that are taking place.

Not only that we need to be extremely good in our observations, books alone cannot provide all the information that we as a instructor need to share with our students. All sources must be used, be it social media, newspaper, televisions, literature to name few.

Assignments

Students can progress their collective knowledge by drawing conclusions and testing what they have learned. Practically most of the time theoretical concepts when implemented differ significantly and that is OK but this should not discourage experimentation rather short small assignments can be fun for intriguing to improve retention.

Words of caution when giving assignment makes sure that you clearly define the objective and purpose (SCOPE) categorically that you are expecting from your students or else it will be waste of time and energy

Stay focused and practise

Often the discussions and experiments may take a turn for the worse. Students need us as facilitators to help guide them back on the right path. Once a new skill is learned, practice followed by repetition strengthens the learning required to retain that skill or knowledge. So repeat the process often until it becomes inherited

Once students are given the basic information than instead of having us as information disseminator by lecture we should make pre-session work more engaging through edutainment and spend the instruction time in discussions, and experimentation.

A word of caution: We must have engaging content that involve and entertain and provide students an emotional connection with quality of information leading to meaningful exploration.

As Instructors we should develop projects and tasks that require interaction even emotionally charged interaction—in a safe monitored environment professionally the way it was done in popular TV show SATYAMEV JAYATAE.

We all must understand the nobility of our profession and commit ourselves for the cause of helping young generations to learn and explore and make learning a memorable experience which they cherish life long

CA Vinod.Kr Sharma

24th September, 2014