Dr. Jitendra K. Das, Director FORE School of Management, Delhi, speaks to management students and faculties in a webinar, on how things are shaping up and how we work and think, is going to change in near future.

On How COVID-19 will impact MBA Education?

The impact of COVID-19 has to be seen in two aspects – one which is the current state of lockdown, while the other is post lockdown period.  During lockdown everything is in an online mode and organizations / institutions which adapted to technologies faster, responded to the situation better thus mitigating on the missing-out of the learning experiences.

Post COVID-19, students and teachers need to adapt to this current situation and feel more comfortable with it for a better learning experience. This technology which is now being adapted to was always present, but unfortunately we did not integrate that into our system until this lockdown situation forced us to do it. This experience will lead to better interactions in the post-lockdown period as we are already familiar with working online.

Remarkable Online initiatives from institutions emerged

While academia grappled with the rapid ‘shift to online’ in such short notice, many online initiatives by institutes started emerging. For many this was totally new. We at FORE School immediately initiated replicating traditional forms of on-campus learning into digital classrooms with online mentorship to keep the momentum. This included summer internships wherein faculty members mentored our students online and encouraged them to pick Virtual SIPs on data collection, research, organisation analysis etc. Some initiatives on approaches of blended delivery are being worked upon too.

Faculty members, who are conscious, awake and aware of the disruptions in their surroundings, are in the process of transforming themselves, the pedagogy and their delivery methodologies to leverage.

Innovation in online-tests beyond the traditional assessments currently predominant

Traditionally, faculty members mostly design exam papers which are answered on the basis of “rote learning” and from content readily available in various sources. But this beats the purpose of an online exam, as answers can be found easily in the online platform. 

Thus, for an online and real time based exam, pattern of the question papers need to be changed so that it is “knowledge based” and requires much more critical and creative thinking.

On product consumer supply chain

During lockdown, the whole product consumer chain is affected as there is no workforce available for manufacturing in the factories. So the government will want to move towards distributed manufacturing methods, where the process is divided in multiple steps and is moved towards tier 2 or tier 3 regions so that workers can work from their villages. This will, in turn, generate more work and the logistics need to be worked out so that it is implemented well. Through minimal and distributed infrastructure not just the turnaround time will be less but cost will also come down with heightened delivery efficiency.

MBA will be depended on the demand and supply understanding.

As the industry will witness a paradigm shift in how they operate, the MBA graduates will also need to change the manner in which they work or think today. New skills to be developed and technologies adopted. They need to be able to foresee and predict a scenario and act fast in a more proactive way on the new challenges while thinking of probable solutions.

A remodeling of the curriculum has to happen and faculty members need to upgrade themselves to newer technologies keeping in mind the new industry changes. The technology domain will have a massive upstream in the coming time. Technologies like VR/AR, AI will come in faster than we expected.

As we are already familiar with video conferences, seminars and conferences can be arranged in a much cheaper and comfortable manner, as the whole experience can easily be simulated online with 100 (or more) people, provided the required bandwidth is available.