Why it's time for management education to turn the page

Professor Arnoud De Meyer, president of the Singapore Management University, has a four-point mantra on how management education needs to change to stay relevant. He feels in this ever changing world, educational institutions need to reflect and factor in changing on four broad themes.

First, they need to reflect deeply on the pedagogy they use and make it lot more experiential. Second, put greater responsibility on the students on their own learning; and for this provide better learning analytics that help students better discover what they have learnt; and fourth, in order to deliver effectively on all these fronts, become very different kind of institutions.

Arnoud De Meyer was speaking in Hyderabad on May 3 at the Indian School of Business on the dialogue on 'changing role of management education - perspectives from East and West' as part of the 'Singapore India Business Dialogue 2018' that was focused on 'managing disruptions in the age of technology'.

Explaining, he said, "I was educated at a time when the professor was a sage on stage. After a while, the professor did not stand on the stage and walked around and we called it interactive classrooms. Now, we are not a sage anymore because all the knowledge is available online. Today, we need to create a learning environment and I am carefully avoiding the word 'teaching' because 'teaching' is of 20th century."

Educational institutions today, he says, need to create a "learning environment where you can have holistic education, both, inside, and outside the classroom, and where they learn how to learn from real world projects." Second, he feels, the institutions need to offer students lot of flexibility and putting the responsibility for learning and what to learn on the students. They need to determine what they want to study and how they want to study.

Third, there have to be better at learning analytics. We determine what the competencies are, and get an idea of what was taught well through quizzes and surveys. We also analyse where gaps existed and get feedback on how much students have understood." Linked to all of these, he says, is the fourth point on the need to create "very different types of institutions, which have alliances and share courses, and where students will pick and choose from different institutions."

Earlier, Rajendra Srivastava, dean and Novartis Professor of Marketing Strategy and Innovation at the ISB, said the management education, the way it has been set up is along disciplinary lines like finance, marketing , management but we need to find out way to work together to solve complex problems. We need collaboration between disciplines, and have industry, academia and government working together. He emphasised that while we talk of multidisciplinary collaboration, we also need to worry about specialisation.