Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar (XIMB), as part of Institute Day celebrations, organised an MBA colloquium on November 30. The objective of this colloquium was to discuss pedagogical innovations in management.
The colloquium was formally inaugurated by Fr EA Augustine, SJ, and Prof Subhajyoti Ray, Dean Academics. On the occasion, a talk was delivered by Prof Sandip Anand. The talk elucidated on appropriate course design, design for service, and design for self-study of students. He highlighted the importance of involving students in various live projects and guiding them for various competitions. He dived into how realistic goals can be accomplished through institutional focus and plans. According to him, the need of the hour is to move away from teacher centric design to student centric design.
The session was then followed by a team of four students from second year (Chandni Rout, Ramakanth Tallapragada, Jeptha Phineahas and Ankit Khera) who presented on the topic ‘Ideal management teaching’, based on the survey they floated across students from prestigious B-schools. They started with a brief introduction, history of management training, best teaching practices, and least preferred teaching methods.
One of the students was a part of a global MBA programme and provided the differences in pedagogical innovations in India, the US, Belgium and the Netherlands. According to him, strategic partnership with foreign universities will help us develop to become respected and empathetic global citizens. New pedagogical innovation adopted by prestigious B-schools, like IIMs, ISB Hyderabad, SIBM and others, were highlighted. The students concluded by saying that the primary focus should be on individual research and developing skills that would benefit students’ aspirations and goals.
An engaging panel discussion followed, which was presided by Prof Avinash Tripathi, Prof Banikanta Mishra, Prof Bhaskar Basu and Prof Ibha Kumar. They emphasised on topics such as theory versus practice, focus on research, using innovative techniques to push subject, and maintaining and engaging attention of students for 90 minutes. Further, they emphasised on moving towards B-schools influencing businesses more than businesses influencing B-schools. The programme was concluded by words of impetus from the administration of the institute.