Experiential Teaching and Learning at the School of
Management
Where
Knowledge
Meets Practice:
The Core of School of Management
Our firm belief at the School of Management is that how we impart learning needs to change, needs to become more student-centric, and should get the student and faculty equally involved in learning and knowledge facilitation. As a progressive, forward-thinking school, the new crop of students requires a very different pedagogical approach that is much more hands-on and experientially driven than a mere one-way delivery of knowledge.
In the 21st Century, Learning by Doing is the New Standard
Experiential learning is creating knowledge through transforming experience in a particular context. Notwithstanding the many advantages of traditional teaching, research has shown that incorporating experiential learning in the pedagogy augments overall learning, builds reflection and enhances decision-making capabilities. Well-designed experiential learning environments contain pedagogical elements that help the student explore, navigate, and comprehend more information about a dynamic system that cannot be obtained through being passive listeners in class. It also improves student-professor interactions as the faculty now assumes the role of a master facilitator, where learning is generated within the group through a symbiotic and engaged process.
Five key themes that help management students level up their skills
Creative Visualisation of Practice
The School of Management at the BML Munjal University designs hands-on activities using easily available materials like Lego® building blocks, die-cast toys, Chinese puzzle Tangram, Origami, Waste papers, disposable cups, etc, to create in-class visualisation of management practice. Two such initiatives are briefed below.
Designing Service Layouts and Blueprints
Service blueprinting is a technique originally used for service design and innovation, but it has also found applications in diagnosing problems with operational efficiency. The activity conceptualised to teach service blueprinting to final year MBA students in their service marketing elective utilised Lego® building blocks, die-cast toys, chart papers and colouring pens. The experiential activity was intended to teach the concepts of service blueprinting, service delivery process, failure and waiting points, checklists, and total quality management. The class was divided into small teams. Each team was assigned to design a service layout and the corresponding blueprint for any of the four different service settings: airport, railway station, zoo and car servicing. The resources required to design each of these setups were made of Lego bricks and displayed at the individual team workstations. Each Lego installation and die-cast toy represented a tangible element of the actual service setting. The teams brainstormed to build the entire service facility layout with the resource materials provided to them. The students were also asked to indicate the waiting and failure points within the service layout. Those teams that innovatively designed the blueprint to minimise failure and waiting points scored higher.
Understanding Costing: The Smart Bucket Exercise
The Smart Bucket venture is a classroom exercise wherein the students manufacture a smart bucket with a special fibre and an inbuilt thermostat and change the water temperature to a temperature conducive to our body. Waste papers, disposable cups and some easily available stationaries were used to create these smart bucket proxies. The primary objective of this exercise is for students to determine the bucket’s cost and selling price and prototype manufacturing the same. The exercise is conducted in the costing capstone course for first-year MBA students. The class is segregated into teams, and each team is provided with the raw materials at a specific cost to create the smart bucket proxies given a particular demand scenario. The teams are advised to be conscious of the cost structure involved initially. Following the manufacturing events, the teams use a cost-plus markup method to decide their selling price, ensuring that it becomes the target price for other entrants in the market. Indeed, several worksheets were provided to the teams to help them understand cost breakdowns and arrive at a decision. Through the activity, the students understand cost behaviour and price dynamics in a competitive market.
Role play & Prototyping
Prototyping, a seemingly complex phenomenon, is often considered the crux of the design thinking process and an integral part of implementing experiential learning. At the School of Management, BMU, several courses take such initiatives. Faculty in-house constantly design activities involving advanced role-plays and create simulated market scenarios. Two such instances are as follows.
The Furniture Market: Sales and Service
The activity is conducted as a part of various Marketing-related courses at the School of Management to teach customers about the role of service delivery and its impact on quality. The materials used for this activity were Chinese puzzle “Tangram” sets, post-it strips, display boards and some proxy money. The tangram is a 400-year-old Chinese dissection puzzle consisting of seven flat shapes, called tans, which are put together to form different shapes. The objective of the puzzle is to form a specific shape (given only an outline or silhouette) using all seven pieces, which must not overlap. The class was divided into individual customers and furniture retailer teams. The retailers provided the customers with printed tangram patterns as a proxy for furniture designs and a tangram set to assemble. The designs were of different difficulty levels and priced differently. The customers dropped by the furniture stores, interacted with the retailer, selected a specific design, paid the respective price, and received the tangram set and the printed pattern to assemble. Some customers were able to fix the parts as per the design. However, some failed to do so in a specified time. This later type of customer came back to the retailers asking for help. The retailer teams devised after-sale service schemes independently at different price points. At the end of the exercise, the customers were asked to indicate their level of satisfaction with the retailer teams with the help of “post-it” strips. The winning team was decided based on profits made and cumulative satisfaction scores. Both the retailers and customers were asked to share their experiences dealing with each other, focusing on the strategies retailers implemented to influence customer behaviour while buying and selling tangrams. In the process, the students understood the application of the concepts related to consumer behaviour in service settings and devising optimal plans for after-sales service.
Retail Warfare: A Team-Based Strategic Board Game of Retail Store Site Selection
Retail site selection is not simply a question of choosing the best real estate space at the best price. The choice of real estate decision should also factor in the understanding of customer behaviour and the demographic characteristics of the customers visiting the store. Other stores and competitors also affect the profitability of a retail store location. Therefore, retail managers are constantly faced with the challenge of deciding on a new store location, the number of retail stores to be opened in an existing market, where to expand the retail network and which stores should be consolidated. ‘Retail Warfare’ is a hybrid simulation game designed to account for the aforementioned factors and to test participants’ analytical skill sets in optimising the dynamics of retail store location choice and profitability. Most simulation games are based on models of reality and a method for implementing that model over time. ‘Retail Warfare’ uses theories of retailing and decision data from game participants to dynamically represent the aspects of reality to provide students with the challenges retail managers face.
In Retail Warfare, six team players move around a game board (with the roll of a die), establishing retail stores at specific sites to increase their market shares and profits in different cities. Profits and market shares are calculated at the end of every round. They are a function of customer demographics, average customer travel time, size of the store, competing stores of the same value proposition, and costs incurred. The game is played for 20 rounds and follows a hybrid format. There is a physical game board depicting different cities, each offering a unique set of retail sites to the players to choose from and a market research report to aid in informed decision-making. Coloured pegs and similarly coloured rummy counters are used to identify the players and their established retail stores on the game board during the gameplay. However, their decisions in each round are keyed into a Google spreadsheet. The information is then automatically collated at a central moderator spread sheet, and the round result is reflected back to the individual player spreadsheet interfaces. At the end of the game, the player with the maximum profits wins. All calculations are based on popular gravity laws in retailing, which forms the learning outcome from the game.
Collaboration and Working in Virtual Teams
The MBA program at the School of Management, BML Munjal University, is residential and admits students from all across India. Therefore, an MBA class is not just multicultural and multilingual but also has students from diverse educational backgrounds and with varied levels of industry experience, most of which are pre-experience or freshers. Many students initially find it difficult to open up, engage with fellow students and peers, and interact with the faculty members and the University. These students intrinsically face the apprehension of getting stereotyped based on idiosyncratic and cultural lineages, apprehension of public speaking and apprehension of their ideas getting rejected, often resulting in withdrawal from the course within the first few weeks of the program. Additionally, many students belong to engineering, basic science and arts backgrounds without any formal business or social studies knowledge, given the fact that a Masters’ level education in business follows a seemingly different mode of learning rigour, creativity, a wide array of course workload, and multiple projects to be executed in teams. Such varied pressures and situations need to be ingrained into the DNA of the students even before they set foot into the School. The MBA Bridge program caters to exactly that. Further description is provided below.
The MBA Bridge: Creating B Plans in Virtual Teams
The School of Management conducts an MBA Bridge Course for about 8 weeks for the students selected for the program. A virtual team-based B-plan competition is organised as part of the Bridge course. The virtual team B-Plan exercise essentially improves existing pedagogical practices in terms of improved student engagement in class, reducing the time for ice-breaking sessions during the orientation program of the new MBA students, improving interpersonal skills of the students, smooth team building and finally, inculcating healthy competition within the classroom environment. Regarding the classical Bloom’s taxonomy, the virtual B plan exercise in the Bridge Course focuses primarily on higher-order abstractions of analysing, evaluating, and finally creating a Business plan in a virtual team setup with the help of available technology. Additionally, it provides the students a platform to experience working in virtual teams, an attribute valued highly by industry professionals.
Ethical Leadership Oriented Social Entrepreneurship Initiatives
In order to sensitise the students to human values and cultivate empathy along with practically using the managerial skills that the students learn in the MBA program, Sankalp: a Social Enterprises for Community Development Project is taken up by the students for the entire two years duration. It is an 8-credit course and requires a lot of thought and effort from the students. As a part of this, students visit underdeveloped and developing villages in the vicinity of the university to understand the needs of the villagers and then, in the later stages, set up sustainable social enterprises to bring about a positive, measurable impact in that village in terms of increasing awareness on hygiene issues, skill development, drinking water availability, sanitation, education, setting up social enterprises etc. over the two years. The students are to present to various companies to solicit their CSR funds to finance these projects. The students are expected to implement all they learn in the classroom, which helps them assimilate and practically apply classroom learning.
Technology-based Gamification
Research over many years indicates that relevant gaming leads to improved learning, increased motivation, and improved performance. Interactive online multimedia games provide a platform where students work together to solve dynamic problems. At the school, we use a variety of interactive simulation games that bring out higher-level thinking skills for students both at undergraduate and post graduate levels. Some games we use are the following:
Marketplace Live
Marketplace Live from Njoy Learning is an online Strategic Management simulation game played in the Strategic Management business courses for undergraduate students at the School of Management, BML Munjal University. In this web-based exercise, students start a new company that enters the microcomputer industry. They deal with Marketing, Product Development, Accounting, Finance and Manufacturing Fundamentals, Financial Analysis, Business Partner Negotiations, Human Resource Management and e-commerce. Throughout the game, students have limited financial resources and complete accounting responsibility. Students are provided the seed capital (virtual investment money) to start their businesses. They can use this money to build a factory, open sales offices and/or a website, and design brands. They invest 2 million in the first quarter and another 1 million in the next two quarters. An additional 4 million becomes available in quarter four from venture capitalists, for 8 million. The executive team has a year and a half (6 quarters or decision periods) to get their company off the ground. Within this time frame, they should become a self-sufficient firm, earning substantial profits from their operations. Students can play against their peers. The grading is based on the balanced scorecard that measures profitability, customer satisfaction, market share in the targeted market segments, human resource management, asset management, and preparedness for the future and wealth.
Merchants from Game-Learn
Merchants is an online game-based learning course for teaching negotiation and conflict resolution. Students learn and apply strategies, techniques and tools to develop and improve their negotiation and conflict-resolution skills. This game is played in the organisational behaviour courses offered in the School of Management. The game is a unique learning experience set in 15th-century Venice. The student plays the role of Carlo Vecchio, a young merchant whose mission is to become the greatest merchant of the age while being mentored by Leonardo da Vinci or Machiavelli. The simulator recreates 6 real cases of negotiation in which the student applies his or her skills to negotiate, communicate a proposal effectively and resolve conflicts.
Outcome achieved by Implementation of the Project
Implementing Experiential Learning benefitted both the students and the School of Management alike. The positive outcomes are reflected on various frontiers. One of the key indicators of the success of any Business School historically has been the employability quotient. Although there is no particular parameter to evaluate the employability quotient, placement records and corporate feedback serve as an important proxy. Going by numbers from our corporate engagement team, a 100% placement of final year MBA students was achieved in the academic year 2017-2018 with an average package of INR 6.63 lakhs/annum by May 2018, with the highest package being INR 15.25 lakhs /annum. In the current academic year, the School of Management has already achieved 80.33% placement of the final year students as of January 4, 2019, with an average CTC package of INR 8.44 lakhs/annum and the highest package being INR 15.70 lakhs/annum. This healthy situation and the positive reviews from the employers and corporations we work with at the School indicate our approach to learning and students.