Some examples of innovation in teaching and learning include:
As a part of the ‘Fixed income securities’ course, the faculty conducted a simulated auction. The bond auction game was conceptualised and designed to provide an idea to the students and give them a practical feel of the bond market to help them better imbibe relevant concepts in the course.
The game comprised of two teams with 20 teams acting as primary dealers in the market that bid for the Rs 90-billion government debt auction held the same day by the RBI, though in a simulated environment.
The whole game was conducted within a three-hour span and the winning bids were to be determined at the closing time of market, i.e., 5 pm. The auction consisted of two types of bids - uniform pricing and discriminatory pricing in the 3 government securities that were open for auction on Friday 7.32 percent bonds maturing in 2014 for 30 billion rupees, 6.35 percent 2020 bonds for 40 billion rupees and 7.5 percent 2034 bonds for 20 billion rupees. There were simultaneous trades at the "when issued" market and the auction market of these bonds.
In the course ‘Internet Banking’, the faculty facilitated the students from batch 2017-2019 to play a google online marketing challenge game. Google gave 10000 USD to each team to run ads on their search engine. Students got a certificate from Google for completing the challenge.
Students ran ads for real companies and learnt how to start from scratch and get returns for ads. The impact was observed on the NGOs that partnered with google to execute their ads run. Students learned the real-world issues in running ads.
One of the faculty members from the finance area teaches a course ‘Capital Expenditure, Planning & Control’ (CAPEX) and as part of the learning, students were engaged in a project called ‘Project Financing’.
All groups of CAPEX students (comprising 5 students per group) were required to create a complete Report to be submitted to the bank which was approached for providing financial help for the said project.
The purpose of this report was to work on a hypothetical case situation (with a real-life tinge) whereby the student groups were required to create the Project Report that will be submitted to a bank which is being approached for providing financial assistance for the proposed project. Moreover, these groups were also expected to “sell” their Project Reports to the concerned bank.
This project provided an exposure to all students (who had undergone this particular course) that helped them to understand topics related to project finance from “cradle to grave” in the very true sense. Exposure to such a project had helped them immensely during the placements as well.
The course ‘Public Policy and Business Strategy’ is at the intersection of public policy and business strategy and using examples from different sectors, the sessions in the second half of the course focus on this intersection. Agriculture is one of the sectors discussed in the second half of the course, whereby students are exposed to the agriculture markets and policies. The faculty takes the students of this course to a farm in Patamda, around 45 KMs (roughly 1.5 hours) from XLRI Jamshedpur. The farm is owned and managed by Rakesh Mahanty, an alumnus of PGP-CEM (2017-18 batch) of XLRI Jamshedpur. Over the years of such student visits, Rakesh has made arrangements for facilitating class discussion in an 'open classroom', i.e., by having an earmarked place to sit under a tree (with charpoys and carpets) and a white board. Rakesh introduces them to the block, the panchayat, the village, the village demographics, and his farm. The students are then shown different places in and around his farm, e.g., pond, sprinkler irrigation system, drip irrigation systems, crop farm, vegetable farm, and greenhouse, etc.
In general, the students in XLRI do not come from a rural or an agrarian background. Hence, they have limited exposure or view about the topic. The objective of this visit is to sensitize students and to develop understanding of the myriad of topics connected with the rural economy that depends heavily on agriculture. Thus, providing students with an experiential learning.
After spending about 2.5-3 hours on the field, the students come back to the Institute and in the next session of the course, the faculty uses presentations, reading materials, and classroom discussions to focus on remaining topics related to the agriculture sector and other aspects emerging from the visit. This ensures that the learning from the farm visit (field) is captured in the classroom, and the classroom discussions further the learning of the students.
In the courses taught by the marketing faculty (course names: Sales and Distribution Management, Principles of Marketing and Marketing Research), case-based teaching is followed. Although it has been in practice in several business schools, but in these courses the faculty involves the teaching and learning with slight variation. Typically, case methods expect the students to use the information given in the case. However, in many circumstances in real life, a decision maker would not get all the information and the decision maker has to infer the missing data based on their understanding of the context. This requires using their experience and market knowledge to infer data. Going by this logic, the faculty pushes the students to go beyond the case facts; relate to the context and infer information. Since students would have different views about the contexts, there would be a debate on the inferences which would help the students to understand the contexts and the problem better.
Develop easy to use frameworks
In the classes, the students come up with various points pertaining to a concept. The faculty places the points raised by the students at different locations of the Board. Finally, the faculty puts the points at different corners on the Board in boxes and connect them with arrows to build a framework to explain the concept. So, the students experience seeing a concept from a narrow view and with the frameworks, it helps them to see the bigger picture. These frameworks form the takeaway from the course that can be applied to different product categories in real life.
Exams
The faculty designs the examination paper around a problem that the students can relate to and ask them to apply the concepts taught in the course. For example, marketing the e-waste collection drive in a city, designing research to understand the issues of conducting the Marketing Fair online, etc. The exams would not only help the students to apply concepts to unconventional products/ ideas, but some exams also create social awareness.
Sometimes, for practice-oriented courses, traditional methods of educating become static and less effective. In such cases, simulation can be useful pedagogy. Students are placed in situations where they can apply their classroom knowledge through simulation-based learning. Simulation as pedagogy helps assess participants' knowledge and abilities by placing them in problem-solving scenarios.
In the course, Strategy implementation through Simulation (SIS), students are required to develop a vision for a company and convert the vision into a strategy. The students are then required to develop a plan for executing the strategy. The plan is tracked through a balanced scorecard developed by students. Based on the plan, students are expected to execute a strategy by running a company for 12 years. Participating in a scenario requires students to quickly assess the conditions and competition, determine a set of decisions to be taken, and execute the plan and do the resource planning.
Participants learn by analysing, understanding and reflecting upon the differences between planned and achieved targets. The simulation helps students develop insights about taking sequential, path dependent and yet dynamic decisions. The students can also apply their intuitive skills and develop tacit knowledge critical for practical decision-making in the real world.
Innovation in teaching: One of the faculty was selected as a finalist for the DSI 2021 instructional innovation award for submission titled “Adapting Teaching to include diversity and for transition to online teaching”. This paper is organized as follows: In the first section, the faculty explains the changes in the innovation in teaching the concept, in the second section, he explains the changes done in his office to teach, to facilitate a better learning experience and have it to as close as off-line teaching as possible. (Link: https://doi.org/10.1177/0258042X221079457)