EDUCATION / MBA SPECIAL...... ‘Flipped’ Classroom Teaching Clicks with B-Schools

‘Flipped’ Classroom Teaching Clicks with B-Schools

Business schools in India are increasingly flipping the classroom, inverting the traditional model by using technology to allow students to listen to lectures online at home and use class time for collaborative learning.
The Indian School of Business (ISB), one of the first management institutes in the country to introduce the “flipped classroom” to teach students a course on entrepreneurial decision-making in its flagship postgraduate management programme last year, is set to expand the use of this active learning methodology. ISB plans to start using in October a technology called Creatist to deliver the flipped classroom to large classes. Another leading business school, SP Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR) has introduced flipped learning for one of its courses in its executive MBA and is considering the use of this model in several other courses.
“The flipped classroom model of teaching is beginning to take shape globally as well as in India,” said Arun Pereira – executive director of the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Case Development at ISB – who used the methodology to teach a class of 70 students from the postgraduate programme batch and won the best professor award. “At ISB, we are currently experimenting with the kind of technology that will be used for flipped classrooms,” Pereira said.
Abbasali Gabula, deputy director-external relations and administration at SPJIMR, said flipped learning would facilitate peer learning to a large extent at the institute since the class has a mix of experienced and fresh candidates. “There is a lot of peer learning which takes place in the B-schools. Flipped class takes this learning to the next level,” Gabula said.
Creatist technology has been developed by Career Aces as an active learning enterprise tool that manages content, security and delivery, gets audience responses and tracks learners’ activities. The product, first rolled out three months ago at Assam University, has 13 patent claims. It is now being introduced at ISB and National Police Academy. Students can access the tool on any platform or device such as smart phones, tablets, iPads and personal computers. “We are targeting corporate houses to use our tool in knowledge management and higher education institutes to deliver active learning in classrooms,” said Shouvik Dhar, director of Career Aces and an ISB alumnus.
The idea of flipped classrooms, which originated in high schools in the United States a few years ago, has gained ground in business schools, with faculty from Tuck School of Business, Columbia Business School and NYU Stern School of Business experimenting with the model.
ET had earlier reported that massive open online courses platform Coursera was discussing the flipped classroom model with several Indian universities. AFTP, another such platform that provides application-oriented business courses, is also pursuing partnerships with IIT Kharagpur, IMT Ghaziabad and IISWBM Calcutta to offer courses for credit in a flipped classroom framework.
“One of the challenges of teaching a large class of students is ensuring everyone is engaged at all times. With the right technology, even large classes can be managed for active learning,” said Pereira, pointing to the benefits of the flipped classroom model for a country such as India which has large-sized classes. A three-day ISB doctoral consortium on teaching that ended on Sunday introduced the concept of flipped classroom to PHD students from IIMs from Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Kolkata, Kozhikode and Indore, XLRI, and MDI in Gurgaon. Sessions were delivered by Professor Aswath Damodaran of New York University’s Stern School of Business, Pierre Dussauge of HEC-Paris and Arun Pereira of ISB.
About 85% of the 27 participants said they would use the flipped classroom method when they start teaching next year.

RICA BHATTACHARYYA ET 130903