Dual Vocational Training System (TVET) model for MBA programs

MBA programs in India, and perhaps abroad as well, are at the crossroads. While the top 3 IIMs may be comfortably placed with their placement story, students of other B-Schools in the country are in a state of tension -- will they or will they not be placed in a job of their choice ? In this post, we explore how the famous German system of Dual Vocational Training (TVET) can make an MBA program more meaningful for corporates, students and for the teaching institution.

As I have argued in another post, B-Schools and the Placement Syndrome, placements are the only reason why B-Schools exist ! We may talk about research in management and of papers  being published in respected journals like Management Science but 99% of B-School students, the primary customers who actually pay for the faculty and the infrastructure, do not really care about such stuff. To them, the reputation of a B-School depends on the percentage of the graduating batch that is placed and the average salary that they have got.

In a sense, the prefix "Master" in the MBA may be the same as in an M.Tech, M.Sc, or M.A. but at the end of the day one must admit that while the last three are designed to be stepping stones to a career in research and a PhD, the MBA is essentially a skill based vocational program that equips students with the tools and techniques that will make him an effective manager.

We can of course redesign the MBA curriculum so that the V-School can become a B-School with a Research Agenda, but I am not sure whether the employers, the secondary customers, of B-Schools would really be interested. Rarely do employers select students on the basis of what they have been taught in a B-School. Had that been so, then students of an IIM would be no better placed than students from any other B-School since the course content is almost identical and the delivery is hardly any better ! Employers go to an IIM because because they know that the selection process of CAT+GD+PI means that the best students are there and if they employ these students it is more likely than not that these students will deliver better results. So the only value that an IIM ( or for that matter, an IIT in a different context ) adds is to act as a filter in the companies recruitment process.

Which brings us back to the idea of placements being central to the reputation of a B-School. Lost in this mad obsession with placements is the fact that the curriculum in a B-School can and does impart substantial and significant skills that can really help a manager with his or her line functions. But the focus being on placements and placements alone, the contents of the curriculum and the quality of delivery is generally ignored. This is the tragedy of the MBA ecosystem in India.

Is there a way out of this unfortunate and uncomfortable situation ? Can a B-School remove the placement pressure, both from itself and from its students, and focus instead on  the delivery of quality education that is really appropriate for companies that hire its MBAs/PGDBMs ?

The answer is "Yes, if we look beyond the standard two-year residential MBA model -- the one with a summer internship in the middle and a placement season at the end !"

An alternate model and one that has worked very successfully in Germany and certain parts of Europe is the Dual Vocational Training System (TVET) -- a time-tested economic model that has been incorporated in the national laws of Germany. This German model is designed for students passing out of (the equivalent of our) Class XII and joining various vocational schools like our ITIs but with a little bit of adjustment can fit our "post-graduate" MBA students as well. Let us see how it works !

After passing out of high school, students apply for internships in companies that offer such a role. Once accepted, the students also join a publicly funded vocational school and for the next two or three years they split the time between the school and the company. This means that the student could be at the company for three days a week, or every other week or a week after every two weeks depending on the model adopted by the school and the company. The school provides a generic, common set of training that leads to a diploma while the company provides training that is specific to the company or the trade ( machinist, boiler operator etc). At the end of the internship period, the student has acquired skills that are of interest to the company and so he or she is generally offered a full time employment.

This Dual Vocational Training System has been credited for Germany's low unemployment figures because it fine tunes student training with exactly the kind of skills that the country's industry needs and ensures that students are trained to fit the job profiles that actually exist. No student is left in the lurch without a job at the end of his coursework.

How can we tailor this model to fit the MBA ecosystem in India ?

Ideally we should begin with a group of MBA colleges but even a single one should be good to start with. This institution ( or group of institutions ) would talk to a group of companies that generally hire MBA students to understand actual requirements of freshers in the current year. Next a common fresher recruitment process is conducted at the institution through a job fair where company HR staff interview and select fresh graduates on the basis of educational background, CAT scores and the usual GD/PI process. Selected candidates are made an offer of appointment, subject to standard rules of probation and confirmation after one year. [ This is very similar to Indian Oil recruiting engineers at the entry level on the basis of GATE scores and not on the basis of the M.Tech program that uses GATE as the entry criteria !]

The students selected by different companies will join the MBA/PGDBM program and pay their own tuition with the understanding and assurance from each company that barring serious disciplinary issues they will be employed by the company at the end of one year.

Since the companies would expect the students to join in the same year itself, the MBA program offered by the institution must be shortened from the standard two-year format to an equivalent one-year format that is explained in my earlier blog post, the 49 week MBA program. In fact this program can be shortened even further if we use the first 22 weeks ( or 6 months ) to deliver the core, compulsory modules of the MBA program and then send the students to the company for their actual internship process.

In a normal MBA program, the students come back to the institution after their internship for their final year classes and this is where this modified program can create a killer advantage if the last trimester of elective subjects are delivered through an inexpensive distance learning mechanism at the company itself where the student is doing his internship !

This means that within six months of the admission process -- the kind of time it takes to run a decent Management Trainee program in any company -- the student is already onboarded into the company and actually working in the area where the company has a need or a vacancy. The last one-third of the MBA coursework can then be executed at leisure through distance learning that could be hybrid of asynchronous, synchronous and even periodic face-to-face interactions. Moreover the kind of electives that are offered could be tailored to meet the requirements of a majority of who are participating in this exercise. Once coursework is completed, the student gets the degree and joins the company as a confirmed employee.

This arrangement is a win-win situation for all participants.

• For companies who are looking for freshers in their management cadre, this is a confirmed pipeline of people whom they themselves have chosen. Irrespective of the number of people that they have selected, the hassle of running a management trainee program for freshers is offloaded to the college at no cost to the company ! Internship payments start only after the first six months when the student comes on board.
• For students the assurance of an internship/probation guaranteed after six months and the high likelihood of its conversion into a employment at the end of the year is a big source of comfort before investing Rs 6 - 8 lakhs in an MBA program. Moreover they can focus on their studies and acquire skills that are important and not get distracted with numerous internship and placement processes that happen in a normal B-School program.
• For the institution the benefit is that both and inbound and outbound supply chains are taken care of and the faculty can focus on their subject, their research and make their pedagogy more effective. Moreover by conducting courses over the distance learning network they can create educational assets whose intellectual property can be monetised and converted into good revenue both for the institution and for the individual faculty members.

Are there any drawbacks in this model ?

Of course companies can renege on their promises and refuse to take the students after six months. This is possible though unlikely because if a professionally managed company has a plan to hire and train freshers then this plan will not change dramatically within 6 months.

However if a student performs very badly in the first six months of coursework or there are performance and disciplinary issues during the internship process then the company should have the right to refuse a final appointment and this must be made very clear to the student before he or she invests in the program.

Finally, how effective is the distance learning mechanism that will be used for the elective courses in the final trimester ? Can these be considered the equivalent of face-to-face courses delivered in a traditional residential program. ? The answer is "Why not ?" Distance learning is fast becoming the norm and MOOCs ( Massively Online Open Courseware ) are being offered by many of the world's finest universities. Georgia Tech is offering an entire MS degree through this route. With a little bit of effort on the part of the faculty to acquire some basic teaching skills, the distance learning route can become the norm not just for electives but for an entire online MBA program as well.

So to sum up we propose that we 

• Adopt the methodology of the time tested Dual Vocational Training System (TVET ) from Germany
• Modify the two-year residential MBA program to shorten it and place it in the TVET mode
• Create a situation that meets the requirements of the corporates, is a safe investment for the students and allows institutions to focus on teaching and research.

Since this process would involve a degree of commitment from the industry, perhaps the CII or Chamber of Commerce could champion this model and take it up with its member companies.

The Inevitability of Universal Online Education

Students today are trapped in a strange dilemma precipitated by disturbing trends. One hand we have the devaluation of the college degree as more and more employers are demanding college degrees for jobs that essentially call for high schools ( see New York Times ) and on the other we have colleges rising exponentially and leading to a second debt crisis. ( See Time ) This may be a new phenomenon affecting the United States but has been a well known problem in the dismal economic scenario in poorer parts of the world. In India we have had the tragedy of graduate and even post graduate students fighting over janitorial opportunities in the arid job market while thousands of students never have the wherewithal to continue their studies beyond high school ( Class XII) or even middle school (Class X) In the gloom that is gathering over the global economy it is the student and the education system that is finding itself trapped in a cul-de-sac that seems to be leading nowhere in general and despair in particular !

image taken from www.usnews.com

Yet, it is only education and learning that could provide a safe, guaranteed, environment-friendly and sustainable way for the world to dig itself out of the hole that it has found itself in. But to use it effectively we must be open to throwing away many of the myths and misconceptions that cloud our judgment and inhibit us from crafting a bold new architecture on which the world of the future can or should be based. An architecture that is based on distance learning and online education.

The biggest myth about online education is that it can never be as effective as face to face classroom training. This has been repeated ad nauseum and has acquired a ring of Gobbelsian authenticity. The fact is that very often face to face classroom education, when delivered by incompetent and under prepared faculty, is no better than no education at all even though students are presented with a degree or diploma for simply sitting through the course and writing an exam. On the other hand, self motivated acquisition of knowledge from websites and Youtube videos have equipped many people with the skills that are necessary in their daily work -- even though there is no universally accepted certification in the end. The bottom line is that it is futile to compare online and class room education. Instead the comparison should be between effective and ineffective pedagogy, between good and bad teachers -- irrespective of the medium or the technology used to transfer data, information, knowledge and wisdom from the teacher to the taught.

The Massively Open Online Courseware ( MOOC ) movement is a step in this direction. In fact big name universities on either side of the Atlantic have come together to create two major consortia -- Edx created by MIT, Harvard and UC Berkeley in the US and FutureLearn consisting of 12 British Universities namely  Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, East Anglia, Exeter, King’s College London, Lancaster, Leeds,  Southampton, St Andrews and Warwick, along with UK distance-learning organization The Open University (OU)  -- have been formed to develop the concept. And then of course there isCoursera a commercial entity  and Udacity created by Google employees who have all stepped into the game. While the jury could be out on the effectiveness and eventual viability of these enterprises, it might make sense  to see what is it that a traditional university has that distance learning must meet, match and exceed to be taken seriously. To understand that let us ask ..

What is a University ? At its most fundamental level a university has three critical characteristics, namely

1. People : Lots of people, both students and teachers
2. Space : A shared space that all these people can access simultaneously
3. Interaction : An environment that encourages vigorous and rich interaction amongst all these people

Now let us look around us and see if these three conditions are being met anywhere in the digital world and the first place that we look at is

Social Media : Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Youtube, Google+, Instagram ... what is common to all these platforms ?

1. People : Again we have lots of people, though not necessarily teachers and students, though they are not excluded.
2. Space : Obviously these platforms are accessible to, and are indeed accessed by, all the people who participate
3. Interaction : There is no dearth of interaction and in fact interactions are the lifeblood of any social media platform.

What is even nicer is that these interactions can be very, very "rich" interactions, not just in terms of media -- that is images, audio, video -- but in terms of questions, answers, clarifications, comments, appreciation, criticism and even evaluation in terms of likes, shares and votes on each and every interaction. In fact I believe that social media interaction is far more richer in terms of diversity and depth than what could ever be possible in the physical world.

So the success of a distance learning program in emulating and surpassing a traditional university lies in its ability to map the university model on the social media model that has become so wildly popular.

In this context, it would be nice to keep in mind that when Apple had first introduced the Newton, a personal digital assistant, way back in the dim, dark “middle ages”, it was not accepted. But the iPad, which is essentially a similar device, was an instant success because ubiquity of the web and proliferation of the cellphone network through which the web could be accessed inexpensively created an environment where the iPad (and other tablet computers) could thrive.

Similarly, distance learning and the concept of open universities as established by institutions offering correspondence courses may not have been very popular but the same when delivered through the medium of a “Web 2.0” or social media platform could be far more effective and popular and pose a credible alternative to the established brick-and-mortar classroom that have become so impossible expensive and unaffordable for large parts of the global population.

One key area that distance learning falters on and yet, one that is of crucial importance to students is a credible evaluation mechanism that employers can depend upon and on the basis of which they can offer job placements. In fact, the popularity of most universities rest, not on what they teach or how, but how many of the graduating batch is placed and at what salaries. In fact, irreverent commentators have compared universities to job placement agencies but from the student’s perspectives that is great significance.

So the real challenge in distance learning is to put together a periodic examination process that attaches a credible grade or marks to each student that the employer can use to sort and sift the good, the bad and the ugly ! This can easily be arranged if we adopt a hybrid model where teaching is online but evaluation done in a  physical classroom under the supervision of strict invigilators in a number of distributed locations that need not be anywhere near the teacher who taught the course. This is hardly a big challenge since we are quite used to conducting examinations like the GRE, GMAT, CBSE, JEE on a nationwide or even global basis through certified and credible franchisees.

The last thing that we need is a placement service that will allow employers to reach out to qualified students and evaluate them in an objective manner. Job portals like Monster and Naukri can be plugged in with the online university and interviews can be conducted on Skype or Google Hangout to any level of detail.

All the pieces are in place. We just need someone to tie all this together and create a solution to problem of delivering credible college degrees to motivated individuals in an inexpensive manner.

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This article originally appeared in techtaffy.com a technology blog published from San Jose, California, USA.

Distance Learning : From Correspondence Courses to MOOC

Distance learning is a very seductive idea.

If we go back to the era of the Mahabharata, we learn about Ekalavya, the tribal boy, who on being denied access to Dronacharya's classes on warfare on account of his caste, taught himself archery simply by observing the teacher from a distance ! The tragic consequences of his effort are well known and should perhaps serve as a warning to societies in general and teachers in particular.

In a more realistic timeframe, approximately a hundred  years ago, correspondence courses appeared and over a period of time these courses became an integral part of various Open Universities. Unfortunately degree granting programs based on correspondence courses never acquired the popularity or employer acceptability of their classroom counterparts for a variety of reasons.

With the advent of computing technology, computer based training (CBT) programs appeared and while these never quite made it to the level of university courses, a lot of vocational training programs were developed on this model. This was particularly so in the case of training for computer oriented skills where both students and the course creators were generally comfortable with the usage of computer software.

Then came the internet and the "killer application" that it helped spawn -- the browser based world wide web. With rapid expansion of both bandwidth and computing power the teacher -- or at least his video, his words, his presentations -- could really overcome the inconvenience of distance and slide into the student's room, or at least his computer.

So is distance learning finally ready for prime time ?

Though a lot of us believe so there are quite a few sceptics who point out that like correspondence courses that were never quite able to replace the university, distance learning is destined to follow a similar trajectory. At best it might end up as a supplement to existing university programs and remain as that stepson who is allowed to stay along in the family along with the new children !

This is wrong and let me explain why it will not be so. It is not enough to have a good idea  -- there must be a field for the idea to germinate and grow into a big tree.

In 1987, when "IBM" personal computers were just about beginning to enter the corporate landscape ( in the Western world, not India ) Apple released a product called Newton -- a handheld computer called the PDA or personal digital assistant that was actually quite smart. Not only was it portable and could do many of the things that a regular computer could, it had some truly futuristic features like handwriting recognition. Unfortunately the product never quite caught on with people and was finally abandoned in 1998.

But only 12 years later, when the same company released a similar device, the famous iPad it got a rousing welcome and it has gone on to become one of the most successful products in the history of computing devices.

What had changed ? First there was the internet, the web and email but perhaps what was most important was mobile telephony. Thanks to the "field" prepared by these technologies, the idea behind the Newton PDA blossomed either as smartphones or tablet computers and has now become the most ubiquitous device that the world has ever seen. Now it is very difficult to question the relevance of any application that is based on these products.

How is this analogy relevant to distance learning ?

Let us assume that correspondence courses and computer based training programs are like the Newton PDA, an idea whose time had not yet come. What has changed since then ?

Before we answer this question, let us step back and examine the "competition". What is it that a traditional university has that distance learning must meet, match and exceed to be taken seriously. To understand that let us ask ..

What is a University ? At its most fundamental level a university has three critical characteristics, namely

1. People : Lots of people, both students and teachers
2. Space : A shared space that all these people can access simultaenously
3. Interaction : An environment that encourages vigorous and rich interaction amongst all these people

Now let us look around us and see if these three conditions are being met anywhere in the digital world and the first place that we look at is

Social Media : Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Youtube, Google+, Instagram ... what is common to all these platforms ?

1. People : Again we have lots of people, though not necessarily teachers and students, though they are not excluded.
2. Space : Obviously these platforms are accessible to, and are indeed accessed by, all the people who participate
3. Interaction : There is no dearth of interaction and in fact interactions are the lifeblood of any social media platform.

 What is even nicer is that these interactions can be very, very "rich" interactions, not just in terms of media -- that is images, audio, video -- but in terms of questions, answers, clarifications, comments, appreciation, criticism and even evaluation in terms of likes, shares and votes on each and every interaction. In fact I believe that social media interaction is far more richer in terms of diversity and depth than what could ever be possible in the physical world.

So the success of a distance learning program in emulating and surpassing a traditional university lies in its ability to map the university model on the social media model that has become so wildly popular.

In an earlier post I had explored how we could deliver Distance Learning on a Social Network Platform but if we look around we would see that the movement towards Massive Online Open Courseware (MOOC) is a step in this direction.In fact big name universities on either side of the Atlantic have come together to create two major consortia -- Edx created by MIT, Harvard and UC Berkeley in the US and FutureLearn consisting of 12 British Universities namely  Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, East Anglia, Exeter, King’s College London, Lancaster, Leeds,  Southampton, St Andrews and Warwick, along with UK distance-learning organization The Open University (OU)  -- have been formed to develop the concept. And then of course there is Coursera a commercial entity  and Udacity created by Google employees who have all stepped into the game,

Distance learning is no more a technology of the future. It is here and now as the technology is widely and inexpensively available. In fact, the way I would put it is that the bus is here but whether you board it or not is something that you have to decide and decide fast !

What would you need to get going ? That will be my next post.

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.

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.

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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 !

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.

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.

Distance Learning with Zoho SHOW and Google Hangout

image : getcareerkhabar.in

Distance learning is a concept whose importance is growing by leaps and bounds everyday. We all know that there is nothing that can beat the physical presence of a teacher in the class but the exigencies of delivering educational services at an affordable price point is forcing everyone -- both students and teachers -- to accept the reality of this technology.

In fact it boils down to the ROI, the return on investment : we all know that it would have been far better to have been at London and watch opening ceremony of the Olympics but the cost of the travel and tickets forced all of us to watch it on TV and I am sure that the Organising Committee earned more from TV rights than what they could have got through ticket sales. So it was a win-win for all to have the show broadcast in a virtual medium even though the experience was sort of degraded by the small screen. So is the case with distance learning.

Most distance learning platforms use a combination of streaming video -- to carry voice and video -- and a way to show slides ( of the Powerpoint variety ) by sharing the screen. I have in the past experimented with Anymeeting and other webinar software to teach my MBA class but the results are very uneven. The Java based software is rather unstable especially if bandwidths are low but what really hurts is the way the screen share is often blocked by campus or corporate firewalls. Moreover when in screen share mode, the presenter -- or teacher -- cannot see the video of the classroom and this makes it very difficult to speak "blindly" into a slide. Believe me, having done this a number of times, I am yet to get used to this and it really cramps your style and having to toggle between the video mode and the screenshare mode is very irritating for the audience.

Which made me look for alternatives and I have discovered that the combination of Google Hangouts + Zoho Show is a wonderful combination.

Let me explain how it works.

We have a class of 60 students and in the front of the class is a computer that is connected to the internet and also to an overhead projector. The teacher creates a Hangout and invites a student to join the same from the computer that is connected to the overhead projector. So the video of the teacher comes on the screen and his voice is heard through speakers. If this computer has a camera then the teacher gets to see the students in the class. [ If you want a better view, a second computer with a camera can also join the Hangout -- you can go upto 10 machines ]

Now it is possible to share a screen from the teachers laptop through the Hangout but this is messy -- the text on the screen becomes small so does the video. So we do not do this.

Instead, the teacher has a second laptop and he uses Zoho Show to run a presentation in broadcast mode. Now each student in the class has a laptop ( all students carry laptops these days, particularly MBA students ) and they fire up a browser and go to a URL of the presentation that the teacher is running. This means that they see the same presentation and -- this is the clincher -- they are always on the same page, or slide where the teacher is ! In fact, when the teacher changes slides, all the students get their slides changed automatically.

So the students watch the teacher talking on video on the common classroom screen on the wall AND they see the slides that the teacher is talking about, on their personal laptops -- closely simulating the situation in a physical class ! And the icing on the cake is that when viewing the Zoho Show broadcast, the students have ready chat screen with them in which to type in questions.

When the teacher sees a student raising his or her hand he looks at the chat screen, reads out the question and then answers it verbally for the benefit of all the students in the class.

The single biggest advantage of this hybrid approach is that because the video is delinked from the presentation the chance of a breakdown / freeze up is far lower. The standard webinar software like Anymeeting, by clubbing the two functions together, introduce a lot of instability that causes frequent breakdowns that degrades the pedagogical experience.

It is not that Hangout does not freeze, but when it does, the teacher can exit the Hangout and rejoin again and the class continues without much difficulty. In fact having two parallel and independent channels across the two locations gives a lot of flexibility to all concerned.

Zoho Show is an excellent cloud based presentation tool where you can either create smart slides or it will happily import existing Powerpoint or OpenOffice/Libre Office presentations. So creating a deck of slides in Zoho is quite easy. But what  makes Zoho Show really useful is the broadcast mode that allows a whole class of students to view the the slide deck synchronously with the teacher and the other students. Google Docs, the other cloud based presentation tool, does NOT have this feature at the moment.

Net-net, after using the Google Hangout + Zoho Show combination for nearly 75 minutes today, both the students and me ( the teacher ) were very happy with the outcome. Let us see how far we can push this technology.

Distance Learning on a Social Network Platform

Distance learning is a topic that excites all but remains a model that is yet to be cracked with any great degree of success. Mr Deepak Parekh, in his inaugural address at the CSI National Convention states that this market will be worth Rs 11 billion in 2012 but as of today will any company actually hire someone who has an MBA degree from an online program ?

It is true that we have had correspondence courses from various open universities and of late many reputed universities like MIT and even our own IITs have come out with presentations and recorded videos that seek to distribute the wisdom of good teachers among students not enrolled with them. Video conferencing has also been tried but again, the fact that they are nowhere as popular as regular class room sessions means that there is something missing somewhere. But the fact remains that hunger for education – especially the kind of professional education that helps people get jobs – is immense. That is why private engineering and business schools are proliferating, even under the malevolent glare of the not-so-lily-white mandarins of India's higher education ! What is lacking though is the availability of good teachers to fill the ever expanding number of class rooms in India. Can we leverage the collaborative-participative model of Web 2.0 to plug this gap ? Before we try to answer this question let us understand two things :

What does current models of distance learning lack ? Obviously physical presence is very important. Watching 30 videos of pre-recorded one hour classes conducted by a professor ( which is the equivalent of a 3 credit college course ) is a very poor substitute for two reasons – it is very difficult to watch and there is no interactivity. Better alternatives can be found in either video lectures through Skype-style platforms or slideshows augmented with lectures delivered over VoIP and white-board software that allows the instructor to “write” on a screen that is shared with the students. In each case, student feedback can be taken through online chat. Net-net the technology exists but why is it not being widely used ? Because this model is difficult to scale up ! The number of people who are comfortable with juggling these multiple technologies – and I have the first hand experience to state that this is not easy even for a net-adept like me – are NOT the kind who have the deep knowledge of say, finance or thermodynamics or organisation behaviour that is essential if they were to be considered credible teachers in any college. Which leads us to the next important concept that we need to understand ...

Web 2.0 – best illustrated by products like Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Orkut – consists of four distinct characteristics. User-generated content, a network of trust, rich media and the fact that it is under constant development or perpetual beta. Consider YouTube as a platform created by Google where individuals create and upload videos that are viewed and commented on (that is “consumed”) by the public at large. Can we do the same thing with college courseware ? But unlike free format YouTube videos, college courseware needs to be aligned to specific requirements and have a certain quality. This is where the other concepts like rich media and networks of trust can be brought to bear.

Let us begin with courses. A 3-credit subject would consist of 30 lectures of one hour each. Each lecture can consist of a 10 min video that explains the idea, followed by, or interspersed with 20 slides that highlights important concepts. The instructor would also have a shared whiteboard to write additional material, a chat-screen where he can receive questions and a Skype-style voice service through which he can broadcast his answers and clarifications. All this can be delivered from one  or preferably two computer screens with touch capability that will allow him to switch easily between video, slides and whiteboard.

Students can either be sitting alone at home with a 3G/broadband connection or could be in a group in a class where two computers would be projecting on two screens – one for video/slides and the other for the white board. Direct voice feedback from a dispersed audience is possible but not desirable because of cross-talk and so an online chat screen from each student's laptop will carry his questions and observations back to the instructor.

Creating teaching content like this is easier said than done. Good teachers must be helped, encouraged and financially motivated to create these modules and this process can be funded – just as text books are commissioned by publishers – by individual colleges. This can be a direct payment – of the kind that is paid to a teacher for teaching a subject  physically – or  some kind of a revenue sharing mechanism. A tech savvy person can also be appointed to help the teacher during the first few sessions. The revenue stream will be derived from subject registrants – either single students or other colleges that will use this subject as a part of their curriculum. This leads us to the next component of a standard Web 2.0 product, the network of trust.

Individual colleges can commission some subjects on their own and can source other subjects from other colleges and institutes and assemble a full blown course ( MBA, BE .. ) in a manner that ensures that all statutory credit requirements are met. Since each college is creating a subset of the entire course, upfront costs will be manageable. A very rough parallel will be YouTube channels – but with the added challenge of schedule management since all pedagogy is live and students cannot attend two lectures simultaneously. So a student who joins a college for say, an MBA course, is assured that he will be able to attend a full spectrum of finance, marketing, operations, behavioral and strategy subjects, over a period of two years ( or more, if we consider week end executive programs ) and will also have access to the all -important placement process – perhaps in conjunction with an online placement agency !

How will all this work in practice ? The core technology consisting of  video capture and display, streaming video, slideshows, white boards, online chat, VoIP, touch screens and broadband internet is all available at a price students are willing to pay for a management or engineering degree. We need a integrative and easy-to-use platform – what YouTube is for videos and Flickr for photos – to make  all this available in a  convenient manner. We need a couple of colleges that will commission content for certain subjects and are willing to use content commissioned by other colleges – and once we have some critical mass, market rules will take over. Student feedback – like the Facebook “like” --  will be used by other students as benchmarks, high quality content will increasingly command a premium and teachers who create them will earn more money if there is a revenue sharing mechanism in place. Orkut or LinkedIn style communities can be created around each subject where students spread across different colleges can interact with each other and with the teacher in asynchronous mode and links to additional material stored on Slideshare, Scribd, Docstoc and other Web 2.0 services can placed. Students can upload assignments into these groups and formal examinations can be conducted either online or with pen-and-paper on college premises with proper invigilation so as to ensure credibility of the degree or diploma that is being awarded.

All this is possible if we have a specialist social networking platform built on the framework of Web 2.0 concepts that will set standards, ensure uniformity and attract membership from both individual students as well as institutions offering management and engineering programs. The Kollaborative Klassroom ( http://kk.praxis.ac.in) is a very tentative step in this direction but a lot more needs to be done to realise the total vision articulated here. But without this totality of features, the project is a non-starter. Fortunately funding all this should be possible with an investment that is only a small percentage of Mr Parekh’s estimated size of this market !

Earlier attempts at distance learning have had limited success because they started out with the premise that we can extract information from a teacher and then exclude him from the equation by automating everything to the maximum extent possible. This is fallacious because teaching is inherently interactive. Social networks – which are the most dominant constructs emerging from the concept of Web 2.0 – are popular precisely because they recognise the centrality of the human being and his quixotic and unstructured interactivity as a key element around which a successful product or service can be built. A distance learning mechanism that can integrate itself into a Web 2.0 social network of the kind that is described here will stand a far better chance of being successful than anything else that has been tried so far.