The document discusses reinventing business education methods. It argues that traditional lecturing is ineffective for retaining student attention and learning. It proposes that education should be more integrated, connecting different subjects and real-world contexts. Instructors should focus more on understanding students, facilitating discussions, assignments, and experiential learning. This helps students better visualize and emotionally connect with concepts. The goal is to shift from instructors disseminating information to helping students explore, experiment, and have memorable learning experiences.

1. Reinventing Business Education
Most of us as a B School instructors are extremely good in information
dissemination by lecturing during the normal class where students spend their
time in either noting the contents or are busy with their gadgets sitting in the
back row.
I empathise with my students as it is extremely difficult for them to switch
from one subject to another day after day. It should not come to us as a
surprise as to why the retention rate amongst students is gradually falling
down drastically
STOP and think!
We must take the onus of this issue and try reinventing our way of delivering
and lecturing, if we really want to justify the nobility of teaching profession.
Lot has been said about integrated education, but still we fail to realize the
true potential of it, mainly because it takes lot of effort on part of the
instructors in making the entire business education process integrated thereby
delivering and creating environment conducive for learning.
Just like business does not operate in silos, so is the process of delivering the
knowledge about business functions. Every aspect of business education is
integrated and interconnected. The elements of Integrated Business Education
can be enumerated as follows:
Connect Reference to Context first.
We often don't know what we don't know and the same goes with the
students they don't care about learning until they realize that they have a
weakness and gain a desire to fix that weakness. This means evaluating the
student, identifying their limitations, and tapping their desires to address the
gap is the first and the foremost job that we have before we actually start the
session.
We must spend our discretionary time and effort in understanding the
student psychology and then according try to customize the delivery pattern
that fulfils purpose amongst the mass group of students.
Though it is difficult but when we do so we tend to connect and bond with our
students well and they start respecting us as the famous saying goes – “The

2. only way to get others interested is by getting interested in them”. I call this
CONNECT by establishing REFERENCE and then move on to CONTEXT.
Spend more time in building up the reference, and only then the delivery of
context becomes extremely easy and the response from the students increases
significantly.
Visualization
We should make an effort while delivering and sharing information amongst
the students in a way that they can visualize and build mental maps that they
can retrieve to draw conclusions and act on them. We humans have unlimited
potential and power to imagine.
Further I feel if could possibly add some emotional appeal to our content than
it is even better as our memory is improved if there are strong positive or
negative emotions tied to what is learned.
Edutainment help us in connecting our content with entertainment to deliver
and create some wonderful learning experiences. We should avoid jumping to
conclusions, and allow students to explore the possibilities. There is NO perfect
answer to a problem, it all depends how you look at the problem, and students
sees much differently than the way we do. We must encourage our students to
explore experiment and enhance their learning experience where our job shifts
from main stage hero to that of a facilitator.
Don’t Broadcast but Discuss
Students literally learn while talking things out. Introvert learners often benefit
from listening to the discussion, internalizing it, and spending time thinking
through their own reactions. We must ensure that the mechanics of our
discussions allow students to “think” and reconnects
Discussion requires openness and preparation one cannot enter into discussion
without preparation, hence we must keep ourselves well informed about the
developments and happenings that are taking place.
Not only that we need to be extremely good in our observations, books alone
cannot provide all the information that we as a instructor need to share with
our students. All sources must be used, be it social media, newspaper,
televisions, literature to name few.

3. Assignments
Students can progress their collective knowledge by drawing conclusions and
testing what they have learned. Practically most of the time theoretical
concepts when implemented differ significantly and that is OK but this should
not discourage experimentation rather short small assignments can be fun for
intriguing to improve retention.
Words of caution when giving assignment makes sure that you clearly define
the objective and purpose (SCOPE) categorically that you are expecting from
your students or else it will be waste of time and energy
Stay focused and practise
Often the discussions and experiments may take a turn for the worse. Students
need us as facilitators to help guide them back on the right path. Once a new
skill is learned, practice followed by repetition strengthens the learning
required to retain that skill or knowledge. So repeat the process often until it
becomes inherited
Once students are given the basic information than instead of having us as
information disseminator by lecture we should make pre-session work more
engaging through edutainment and spend the instruction time in discussions,
and experimentation.
A word of caution: We must have engaging content that involve and entertain
and provide students an emotional connection with quality of information
leading to meaningful exploration.
As Instructors we should develop projects and tasks that require interaction
even emotionally charged interaction—in a safe monitored environment
professionally the way it was done in popular TV show SATYAMEV JAYATAE.
We all must understand the nobility of our profession and commit ourselves
for the cause of helping young generations to learn and explore and make
learning a memorable experience which they cherish life long
CA Vinod.Kr Sharma
24th September, 2014