The Digital Way of Learning

After my two blog posts about ventures capitalizing on latest education trends, today I would like to write about a trend which none of us can dare to ignore. Any guesses...well most of you must have guessed correctly. I am talking about the extensive use of social media. There can no better time than this to write about this topic. With Gangnam Style becoming most watched video ever on Youtube and Psy becoming an icon in less than six months, it only justifies the importance given to social media in all aspects of life. Education, as such, cannot remain untouched by this phenomenon.  The importance increases manifolds if someone is pursuing an MBA in marketing as more and more companies are focusing on this inexpensive yet so wide medium of marketing.

More and more colleges are incorporating digital marketing in their curriculum. The course focuses extensively on topics like viral marketing, use of social media, blogs, etc. in marketing. In fact, the whole delivery of the course also takes the digital route in order to imbibe the digital culture in the team. Students can discuss the course material on Facebook groups and pages. They can post videos and other important links to enhance the learnings of the whole group. In this way, even the content is crowd sourced to a great extent, again the very nature of things going the digital way.

We at SP Jain have also adopted this digital route in learning the nuances of marketing. While we hear about a lot of faculties discouraging the use of Facebook to avoid distraction, this course completely adopted the Facebook route. We posted useful information, posted queries and received responses from fellow students and the faculty. As a step further, the students are also required to start a commercial blog and are graded based on the viewership and the amount of money earned by blogging activity. In fact, even this blogging activity that I have started is a result of this course. Needless to say, I am enjoying this new way of learning by doing.

That’s it for now. Stay tuned for more.

Experiential Learning

As a continuation of my previous blog on latest trends in education, I am writing about something that is attempting to change the delivery of MBA education. With this blog, I would also like to share my own experience as an MBA student and how the change has helped me for good.

As some of you might know, traditional MBA education is mostly what we call as death by case studies. I too went through this process and am still doing it. Trust me, it gets really boring and mundane if you have to do it every day for your course duration. I am not an exception. Just when I started losing focus, two back to back courses of IT management and decision making using a new teaching methodology came with a breeze of fresh air. Now you might be wondering as to what was different in these courses. Well, these courses used simulations in the teaching process. The method focused on experiential learning though simulations of real life business problems. The simulations were products of two companies – Capsim and Knolskape. Let me tell you about my experience with their simulations and the other offerings of these companies.

1. Capsim

This was a simulation we did for our decision making course. In this simulation, six teams competed against each other, each team running a company in the sensors industry. The simulation included eight rounds. In every round, teams were supposed to take decisions regarding all the aspects of a business including marketing, R&D, HR, training, and finance. The whole idea was so interesting that for the duration of the course we eat, drank and dreamt only about Capsim. I still remember when we went to the birthday party of a batchmate and all we talked about was Capsim. The competition was intense and we were hooked onto it. Looking back I think this was an excellent idea about learning by doing things. Apart from regular courses, Capsim also runs an international challenge were teams from all over the world compete against each other. A huge participation in this challenge is again a testimony to the success of this teaching methodology.

2. Knolskape

Knolskape offers business simulations in a variety of aspects including risk management, change management, crisis management, pricing, IT governance, etc. We participated in a simulation related to change management. Here again, it was so different from the usual boring case studies. In change management, we learnt about convincing the key stakeholders in bringing a change in the organizational systems. This simulation was so close to real life scenarios where some people in the organization would like the change, some will fight tooth and nail against it as if there life depends on it. Then there were some people with whom one has to lobby to convince the key decision makers. Now, we all have seen or experienced organizational politics. Some have succeeded with politics while most have just burnt their fingers. This simulation very nicely taught us how to handle these bloody wars in the safe environment of a classroom.

Knolskape is getting significant attention due to its unique offerings. It has recently received a Red Herring Asia Top 100 Award and is amongst NASSCOM Top 10 Technology Startups.

With this, I would like to end this post. Hope I have provided some new information to you. Stay tuned for more updates on the latest trends in education. 

Some Really Exciting Services in Education

As the technology advances, it also finds its way in different sectors. Education is not an exception. Information and communication technology is increasingly used in better delivery of the educational services. New ideas have come up that can aid or replace the traditional forms of delivery of education services. This blog post aims at providing a list of some really exciting ventures using information technology (IT) in the field of education.

 1. ThinkVidya.com

This website aims at providing solution to a problem that a lot of us have faced at some point in time. The problem is related to students’ (and their parents') difficulty in finding a right trainer/tutor or an institute to meet their educational needs. Sometimes, students are not able to find a tutor/trainer at all. On other occasions, there is so much confusion in a student’s mind that he/she often ends up making a bad selection thereby regretting in future. ThinkVidya serves this basic student need in following ways:

• It provides a strong network of 20,000+ qualified tutors and trainers offering services in different educational fields
• Students and parents can post their specific learning need mentioning the subject, preferred location and timing, etc. Then they receive applications from tutors and trainers in the ThinkVidya network along with their detailed profile. The students and parents can then review the profiles and make a selection that best suits their needs.
• ThinkVidya also provides a forum where parents can follow their schools of interest. They can read and share reviews/information about schools. Parents can also receive admission alerts for the schools of their interest. This way parents can make informed decisions about their children’s admission.

Not surprisingly, this website is getting popular day by day. On an average, it receives about 17,000 page views per day.

2. EduKart.com

This is one website that aims at completely replacing the traditional modes of education delivery. The website focuses on online delivery of various courses including MBA, undergraduate courses, post graduate courses, programming languages, project management, career enhancement, etc.  More interesting is the way the website is structured. All the courses are shown in a way as if someone is buying an item online on a website like amazon.com. The user needs to add a course of his interest in a shopping cart and pay for it. The online education delivery starts once the user has made the payment. This reflects a drastic change as to how education is perceived with the advancements in IT. I would say that this website is trying a transformational change by projecting education as a product instead of a service.

Though, the jury is still out on the quality and success of this delivery model, it nevertheless makes an interesting topic to analyze.

Finally, this is not an end to the list. I would like to write about other interesting ventures in my next post. Stay tuned for the same.