Technology and Contemporary Management Education Subhendu Dey Associate Dean Academic Affairs Globsyn Business School Kolkata

a The MBA market is going through a massive change. The number of CAT applicants has come down by a lakh over the last two years making many business schools struggle to fill up seats. According to AICTE, last year around 30% of the existing 200,000 management seats remained vacant. A steep increase in fee along with lower job prospects post the financial crisis has further added to the woes. When the market conditions were favorable and fee structures lower, ROI was used to credibly explain the attractiveness of MBA. Today the same ROI is presenting a contrasting scenario.

Three things are important for students tuition fee, the average opening salary that students get on passing out from the school and academics, for him to get attracted towards studying business management. Of these three, jobs are dependent on the market conditions and hence business schools cannot do much about it. However business schools can certainly do something about their fee structures, while constantly striving at increasing the value of the product. These two are in the hands of the schools, but profitability can be an issue here. Technology can play a vital role in addressing that concern.

Technology allows schools to innovate. All innovations usually go through a phase of nonacceptance by those meant to be served by it to a complete acceptance and adaption. Adaption typically happens with improvements over a few cycles addressing both the cost structure and the quality of the services that it replaces. Thus, innovation achieves its mandate by redefining quality in simple, small steps to combat hugely complicated problems, ultimately emerging as a robust framework to look for higher market shares and address the profitability concerns.

In todays context business schools have to look at technology as a means of replacing expensive, dissimilar and scarce teaching resources to provide operational savings and improve quality by performing routine, structured activities unfailingly and efficiently. Since teaching is at best a semi-structured activity, it cannot be fully automated. Yet, there are certain features of traditional classroom instruction that may be automated. A way could be to divide a course into three major segments the easy concepts, the moderately difficult concepts, and the difficult concepts. Students should be able to study the easy concepts on their own. For the moderately

difficult concepts the faculty facilitates the learning. Faculty provides inputs only on the difficult concepts. If done well, this can free up facultys teaching time considerably. Good business schools strive to offer a plethora of value propositions around teaching, research, and preparing students for good careers. Also, the significant overhead costs compel many schools to divert resources on other things than research and teaching. This free time can instead be utilized towards doing research on innovative ways of knowledge creation and dissemination thereby benefitting the students more.

Technology also allows students to receive quick feedback, much quicker than what traditional systems allow, thereby helping create learning management systems that can easily embed actionable assessments providing immediate feedback for students to self-assess and take corrective actions. Using technology, focusing entirely on students learning through a structured program aimed at making students industry ready will not only give the initial cost advantage, but will also allow scaling up of operations. This can create a win-win situation of cost reduction and improved learning outcomes for students. Thus, if business schools have to come out of the current bleak scenario, they have to adapt technology as never before.