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| Subhrendu Mukerjee "Never Born, Never Died. Stopped by the World between 1927 and 1992" |
A full list of all my known ancestors is available at this blog post.
September 30, 2012
Fortnight for Ancestors : Pitri Paksha
A full list of all my known ancestors is available at this blog post.
September 27, 2012
September 23, 2012
September 21, 2012
The 49 week MBA program
The B-School business is in a bit of a crisis ! Globally, MBA applications are falling [ WSJ ] and in India many B-Schools, especially those run by slightly shady operators, are shutting down [ ToI ]. An obvious reason for this state of affairs is that, at least in India, the AICTE has created an environment where only shady people with little interest in education but with bags of money are allowed to build and operate B-Schools. Given the current state of political leadership in the country it is futile to expect any kind of policy support and so it is up to the B-School community to figure a way out of this rut.
Should we revamp the curriculum ? To make it more relevant ? Datar in Rethinking the MBA has identified that MBA programs should focus on leadership skills, creative and critical thinking. In an earlier post I have explored the possibility of replacing the functional approach in the MBA program [ Marketing / Finance / Operations / HR ] with a more holistic approach that balances the application of left and right brain skills.
Another approach could be to make the MBA program more compact, efficient and effective. Can we cut the flab from the AICTE mandated 2 year program and come out with something that is shorter and so less expensive ?
While we cannot deny that placements is the principal reason why students join B-Schools, pedagogy is important as well. A quick survey of well known B-School curriculum shows that the teaching credits that range from 72 at Kellogs, 60 at Stonybrook, 60 at Stern, NYU, 51 at Haas, Berkeley, 60 at Harvard and 63( equivalent) at Wharton, UPenn. So if we shorten the program, we need to make sure that it delivers a significant amount of course content.
Here is a sample MBA program that comfortably delivers 72 credits of actual teaching in just 49 weeks.
Term 2 - 10 weeks of teaching @ 30 hours/week + 1 week for examination = 11 weeks
Term 3 : Company Internship OR Management Research Project
8 weeks of Project Work worth 8 credits
Term 4 : 10 weeks of teaching @ 30 hours/week + 1 week for examination = 11 weeks
Placement : 4 weeks
So the total duration is 3 teaching terms of 11 weeks each ( 33 week ) + 8 weeks Internship+ 4 weeks for Placement + 4 weeks for inter-term holidays, public holidays, registration, viva etc. to arrive at a figure of 49 weeks.
Here we have assumed that a 3-credit course requires 36 contact hours even though many B-Schools are happy to offer only 30 contact hours.
Should we revamp the curriculum ? To make it more relevant ? Datar in Rethinking the MBA has identified that MBA programs should focus on leadership skills, creative and critical thinking. In an earlier post I have explored the possibility of replacing the functional approach in the MBA program [ Marketing / Finance / Operations / HR ] with a more holistic approach that balances the application of left and right brain skills.
Another approach could be to make the MBA program more compact, efficient and effective. Can we cut the flab from the AICTE mandated 2 year program and come out with something that is shorter and so less expensive ?
While we cannot deny that placements is the principal reason why students join B-Schools, pedagogy is important as well. A quick survey of well known B-School curriculum shows that the teaching credits that range from 72 at Kellogs, 60 at Stonybrook, 60 at Stern, NYU, 51 at Haas, Berkeley, 60 at Harvard and 63( equivalent) at Wharton, UPenn. So if we shorten the program, we need to make sure that it delivers a significant amount of course content.
Here is a sample MBA program that comfortably delivers 72 credits of actual teaching in just 49 weeks.
Course Structure of 49 week program
Term 1 - 10 weeks of teaching @ 30 hours/week + 1 week for examination = 11 weeks| Subject | Teaching Credits | Contact Hours |
| Marketing - I | 2 | |
| Human Behaviour and Management - I | 2 | |
| Organisational Design, Change and Transformation | 2 | |
| Financial Accounting and Reporting | 2 | |
| Cost and Management Accounting | 2 | |
| Statistical Methods for Management | 2 | |
| Mathematical Models for Management Decisions | 3 | |
| Management Information Systems | 3 | |
| Business Ethics | 2 | |
| Organisational Leadership | 2 | |
| Oral and Business Communications | 2 | |
| Total | 24 | 288 max |
Term 2 - 10 weeks of teaching @ 30 hours/week + 1 week for examination = 11 weeks
| Subject | Teaching Credits | Contact Hours |
| Marketing - II | 2 | |
| Human Resource Management | 3 | |
| Economics for Management | 3 | |
| Corporate Finance | 3 | |
| Production and Operations Management | 3 | |
| Business, Government and International Economic Environment | 2 | |
| Business Law for Managers | 2 | |
| Strategic Management | 2 | |
| Written Business Communications | 2 | |
| IT for Business Applications | 2 | |
| Total | 24 | 288 max |
Term 3 : Company Internship OR Management Research Project
8 weeks of Project Work worth 8 credits
Term 4 : 10 weeks of teaching @ 30 hours/week + 1 week for examination = 11 weeks
| Subject | Teaching Credits | Contact Hours |
| Choice of 8 - 10 electives from the pool of possible electives | ||
| Total | 24 | 288 max |
Placement : 4 weeks
So the total duration is 3 teaching terms of 11 weeks each ( 33 week ) + 8 weeks Internship+ 4 weeks for Placement + 4 weeks for inter-term holidays, public holidays, registration, viva etc. to arrive at a figure of 49 weeks.
Here we have assumed that a 3-credit course requires 36 contact hours even though many B-Schools are happy to offer only 30 contact hours.
So what is the moral of the story ?
The current 2 year MBA program is on its way to becoming a part of history. We need to revamp it with a new curriculum, a new technology enabled delivery platform, a more efficient placement process or as is explained here a shorter, more cost-effective program itself.
Or why not combine all these elements into something new and radically different ?
I am sure that many people will find a million things wrong with this approach, but let the debate begin !
September 12, 2012
September 02, 2012
Distance Learning : An Inverted Model for Indian B-Schools
"No army can stop an idea whose time has come." This quotation from Victor Hugo has often been used in defence of many new but unpopular ideas and I will invoke it here to justify the usage of distance learning techniques, particularly in business schools that lead up to an MBA degree.
Whether we like it or not, many global trends are first set in the United States and then the rest of the world joins in and distance learning is one of them. Respected and well known schools like Stanford, Harvard and others are offering a large number of undergraduate and postgraduate programs that are based on a calibrated mixture of on-line and on-campus pedagogy.
Despite criticisms of being less effective than face-to-face teaching, distance learning is here to stay and grow because of compelling economic reasons -- many students are simply not able to pay the kind of fees that big US schools charge and unless schools are able to offer education at the price point that students can afford, the invisible hand of the free market will make the business of B-Schools unviable ! So just as US companies have accepted the hard economic reality of software services being outsourced to India, so will B-Schools accept the reality of distance learning.
But as many all cases, the Indian market is different from the US and that is why it may make sense to invert the model that is being followed in the US. In the US, the dominant pattern is that the faculty is sitting in Harvard or Stanford whereas the students are scattered anywhere in the world -- as long as they have a broadband Internet connection and a credit card. You register, pay, log-in and access course material either synchronously ( as in live lectures ) or asynchronously by downloading videos, slide decks and books. The only real challenge is the evaluation or examination process where it is difficult to ensure a no-cheating rule but it is a matter of time before even this will be resolved.
How is this different from the Indian B-School market ?
In India there is no dearth of "customer"s and students are flocking to even some very shady B-Schools that have been created by crooked entrepreneurs with the active connivance of the regulatory bodies for higher education. But the real trouble is that there is no one to teach ! There is no good faculty, not just in these shady schools but also in the well funded, well known and well regarded Government schools like the IIMs and the IITs !
While the situation is understandable in the small schools, the situation in the big schools may be puzzling but easily explained in economic terms. Let us look at this issue from the perspective of who should be teaching in B-Schools and who are actually doing so.
B-schools act as feeders into corporate management and should typically impart skills that are necessary to run a business profitably and ethically. Ideally, a B-School faculty should be someone who has the practical experience of being in the corporate sector and has been in a senior position. In such positions, he should have faced and resolved real issues in the area of finance, marketing, operations, HR and business strategy. But instead, what we find in B-Schools ( particularly the IITs/IIMs) are academics with PhD degrees who (a) are paper tigers with scores of theoretical papers published in academic journals that are only read by other academics, not by corporates and what is worse (b) are people who have never had the ability or the confidence of actually working in the industry. What rubbish do they teach ?
Why is this ? Economic reasons. Under the 6th Pay Commission, a senior faculty at a premier Government institute is paid around Rs 12 - 15 lakhs for annum which is just on par with the average salary that an MBA student gets when he or she passes out from the same school !! A well respected manager, with about 15 - 20 years of experience -- the kind that we would like to have as teachers in MBA schools, would be drawing anything from Rs 40 - Rs 80 lakhs per annum. Now no sane person in his senses will leave his corporate job -- however stressful it may be -- and take a 80% salary cut to join a B-School. And even in a moment of madness (for example when he has been passed over in the annual promotions ;-) he were to contemplate this, his financial commitments ( children's education, EMI for flat) will prevent him from doing so. And if this involves moving to a different, non-metro area, then the spouse will have violent objection because she would be cut off from her normal earning and entertainment opportunities. ( This assumes that the person concerned is a man but is even more true if it is a lady who is contemplating this move)
So in the US, they have lots of good faculty in good schools but losing students but in India we have lots of students but no faculty. Hence time to invert our model of distance learning.
In an earlier post on Zoho Show and Google Hangout I have shown how easy it is for a faculty, sitting a distant location, to teach a class full of students using simple and inexpensive technology.
So my model works like this. We set up a B-school and create the infrastructure for students to live and work. In fact this could be at remote and picturesque locations so that academics is not disturbed by the discordant notes of urban life and, perhaps this is more important, land is cheap and so capital costs are low.
There is no need to recruit any full time faculty at all and in any case, if the location is remote, good faculty will in not join anyway. Only utterly jobless people who cannot go anywhere else or old and retired professors trying to pass of their ancient and out-dated knowledge in their second and third innings of their career will be interested. This is precisely the kind of people whom we do not want in our B-Schools.
So instead of recruiting full time faculty, what we have is a network of high end managers located wherever they are currently employed -- anywhere in India. In each city we can either set up a small "transmission" kiosk, through a telephone operator or if the faculty is comfortable enough install the simple hardware ( basically one or two computers with audio/video and a high speed internet connection ) at his home or place of work.
On campus we create an excellent telecommunication infrastructure so that every student has more than adequate bandwidth (enough even for his not-so-surreptitious Torrent downloads ;-) both in class as well as in the hostel.
To make things a bit smooth, the faculty may be required to make one visit to the campus at the beginning of the semester, get acquainted with the students and if necessary get familiarised with the technology. As the class progresses, he can keep in touch with his students through private social media platforms like the Kollaborative Klassroom or through more mainstream media like LinkedIN or Facebook. In fact the Coursera model has similar ideas but we need to remember that it is US model and so needs to be tweaked for our inversion.
This model also removes the one big irritation in traditional distance learning -- how to conduct valid examinations ? In this case, this is not a problem at all since all the students are located on the campus and local staff ( not distant faculty) can monitor the examination and ensure fairness. Moreover with the students living together on the campus, there is no difficulty for them to work together and collaborate on assignments -- which is one of the important aspects of B-School pedagogy.
While this model will allow a Institute to draw upon the best B-School faculty from anywhere in the country, it also has the potential to push up faculty earnings in a dramatic manner. Typically a faculty at a premier Government Institute teaches two 3-credit subjects in a semester and so faces a class for six hours every week. [ I am ignoring "research" because B-School research is generally pointless-data-collection-followed-by-regression-analysis, nothing else. It is done only for the purpose for faculty promotions because of the philosophy of publish or perish adopted in many Institutes ] For this six hours of work per week he is paid Rs 12 lakhs. A corporate manager works 40+ hours a week and gets say Rs 60+ lakhs. So it makes sense for a corporate manager to move to academics if and only if he can teach in at least five or six institutes simultaneously -- and this is very much possible if we adopt the distance learning model that was explained in my earlier post ! In fact with this model, well known Institutes can create the distance learning environment that will allow their faculty to enhance their income five or six times and so draw the best people from the corporate world into the academic domain.
Of course faculty is not the only thing that matters in a B-School. Placement plays a very important role in the success of school. We also need to look at the existing curriculum and see what changes can or should be made. But these are big topics and need to explored separately.
Let us first get cracking with the faculty issue and address it with our inverted model of distance learning. It is a win-win strategy that benefits both Institutes as well as faculty since the former gets good teachers and the latter gets to earn much more without stressing the economic and business model of MBA education in India.
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| Image "borrowed" from http://smude.edu.in/blog/tags/distance-education |
Whether we like it or not, many global trends are first set in the United States and then the rest of the world joins in and distance learning is one of them. Respected and well known schools like Stanford, Harvard and others are offering a large number of undergraduate and postgraduate programs that are based on a calibrated mixture of on-line and on-campus pedagogy.
Despite criticisms of being less effective than face-to-face teaching, distance learning is here to stay and grow because of compelling economic reasons -- many students are simply not able to pay the kind of fees that big US schools charge and unless schools are able to offer education at the price point that students can afford, the invisible hand of the free market will make the business of B-Schools unviable ! So just as US companies have accepted the hard economic reality of software services being outsourced to India, so will B-Schools accept the reality of distance learning.
But as many all cases, the Indian market is different from the US and that is why it may make sense to invert the model that is being followed in the US. In the US, the dominant pattern is that the faculty is sitting in Harvard or Stanford whereas the students are scattered anywhere in the world -- as long as they have a broadband Internet connection and a credit card. You register, pay, log-in and access course material either synchronously ( as in live lectures ) or asynchronously by downloading videos, slide decks and books. The only real challenge is the evaluation or examination process where it is difficult to ensure a no-cheating rule but it is a matter of time before even this will be resolved.
How is this different from the Indian B-School market ?
In India there is no dearth of "customer"s and students are flocking to even some very shady B-Schools that have been created by crooked entrepreneurs with the active connivance of the regulatory bodies for higher education. But the real trouble is that there is no one to teach ! There is no good faculty, not just in these shady schools but also in the well funded, well known and well regarded Government schools like the IIMs and the IITs !
While the situation is understandable in the small schools, the situation in the big schools may be puzzling but easily explained in economic terms. Let us look at this issue from the perspective of who should be teaching in B-Schools and who are actually doing so.
B-schools act as feeders into corporate management and should typically impart skills that are necessary to run a business profitably and ethically. Ideally, a B-School faculty should be someone who has the practical experience of being in the corporate sector and has been in a senior position. In such positions, he should have faced and resolved real issues in the area of finance, marketing, operations, HR and business strategy. But instead, what we find in B-Schools ( particularly the IITs/IIMs) are academics with PhD degrees who (a) are paper tigers with scores of theoretical papers published in academic journals that are only read by other academics, not by corporates and what is worse (b) are people who have never had the ability or the confidence of actually working in the industry. What rubbish do they teach ?
Why is this ? Economic reasons. Under the 6th Pay Commission, a senior faculty at a premier Government institute is paid around Rs 12 - 15 lakhs for annum which is just on par with the average salary that an MBA student gets when he or she passes out from the same school !! A well respected manager, with about 15 - 20 years of experience -- the kind that we would like to have as teachers in MBA schools, would be drawing anything from Rs 40 - Rs 80 lakhs per annum. Now no sane person in his senses will leave his corporate job -- however stressful it may be -- and take a 80% salary cut to join a B-School. And even in a moment of madness (for example when he has been passed over in the annual promotions ;-) he were to contemplate this, his financial commitments ( children's education, EMI for flat) will prevent him from doing so. And if this involves moving to a different, non-metro area, then the spouse will have violent objection because she would be cut off from her normal earning and entertainment opportunities. ( This assumes that the person concerned is a man but is even more true if it is a lady who is contemplating this move)
So in the US, they have lots of good faculty in good schools but losing students but in India we have lots of students but no faculty. Hence time to invert our model of distance learning.
In an earlier post on Zoho Show and Google Hangout I have shown how easy it is for a faculty, sitting a distant location, to teach a class full of students using simple and inexpensive technology.
So my model works like this. We set up a B-school and create the infrastructure for students to live and work. In fact this could be at remote and picturesque locations so that academics is not disturbed by the discordant notes of urban life and, perhaps this is more important, land is cheap and so capital costs are low.
There is no need to recruit any full time faculty at all and in any case, if the location is remote, good faculty will in not join anyway. Only utterly jobless people who cannot go anywhere else or old and retired professors trying to pass of their ancient and out-dated knowledge in their second and third innings of their career will be interested. This is precisely the kind of people whom we do not want in our B-Schools.
So instead of recruiting full time faculty, what we have is a network of high end managers located wherever they are currently employed -- anywhere in India. In each city we can either set up a small "transmission" kiosk, through a telephone operator or if the faculty is comfortable enough install the simple hardware ( basically one or two computers with audio/video and a high speed internet connection ) at his home or place of work.
On campus we create an excellent telecommunication infrastructure so that every student has more than adequate bandwidth (enough even for his not-so-surreptitious Torrent downloads ;-) both in class as well as in the hostel.
To make things a bit smooth, the faculty may be required to make one visit to the campus at the beginning of the semester, get acquainted with the students and if necessary get familiarised with the technology. As the class progresses, he can keep in touch with his students through private social media platforms like the Kollaborative Klassroom or through more mainstream media like LinkedIN or Facebook. In fact the Coursera model has similar ideas but we need to remember that it is US model and so needs to be tweaked for our inversion.
This model also removes the one big irritation in traditional distance learning -- how to conduct valid examinations ? In this case, this is not a problem at all since all the students are located on the campus and local staff ( not distant faculty) can monitor the examination and ensure fairness. Moreover with the students living together on the campus, there is no difficulty for them to work together and collaborate on assignments -- which is one of the important aspects of B-School pedagogy.
While this model will allow a Institute to draw upon the best B-School faculty from anywhere in the country, it also has the potential to push up faculty earnings in a dramatic manner. Typically a faculty at a premier Government Institute teaches two 3-credit subjects in a semester and so faces a class for six hours every week. [ I am ignoring "research" because B-School research is generally pointless-data-collection-followed-by-regression-analysis, nothing else. It is done only for the purpose for faculty promotions because of the philosophy of publish or perish adopted in many Institutes ] For this six hours of work per week he is paid Rs 12 lakhs. A corporate manager works 40+ hours a week and gets say Rs 60+ lakhs. So it makes sense for a corporate manager to move to academics if and only if he can teach in at least five or six institutes simultaneously -- and this is very much possible if we adopt the distance learning model that was explained in my earlier post ! In fact with this model, well known Institutes can create the distance learning environment that will allow their faculty to enhance their income five or six times and so draw the best people from the corporate world into the academic domain.
Of course faculty is not the only thing that matters in a B-School. Placement plays a very important role in the success of school. We also need to look at the existing curriculum and see what changes can or should be made. But these are big topics and need to explored separately.
Let us first get cracking with the faculty issue and address it with our inverted model of distance learning. It is a win-win strategy that benefits both Institutes as well as faculty since the former gets good teachers and the latter gets to earn much more without stressing the economic and business model of MBA education in India.
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