The Conference Theme

The theme chosen for the Conference is Higher Education: Special Emphasis on Management Education. The purpose of the fourth Conference is to bring together ideas of inclusive thinking, sustainability, balance of the cognitive and the effective, ideals of student-professor interaction as mentors-mentees, reverse mentoring, balance of professionalism and relationship orientation, impact of pedagogy in the way we see things around us, recent advances in positive psychology and management education, recent neuroscience findings and higher education, and related issues in academic administration, technology, accreditation, admission process for MBA education etc.

Sub-themes

Innovative Pedagogies  

Now pedagogy is to be reoriented to fulfill the aspirations of young students who are indeed the real stakeholders. The expectations of these stakeholders keep on changing with the change in business environments. Maximum possible use of modern technology and open source learning resources should be the ingredients of the innovative pedagogy. Teaching should be creative which besides preparing stakeholders for challenges of business environment would help them to take up research as well in the new and emerging areas.

Learner-centered Management Education

Learner-centered education refers to a system that pays careful attention to the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and beliefs that learners bring to the educational setting. This term includes teaching practices that have been called "culturally responsive," "culturally appropriate," "culturally compatible," and "culturally relevant". Management pedagogy needs to move towards this goal of learner-centered education.

Employability: Short Term and Long Term

The debate on academic excellence versus employability is going on since a long period of time. It’s now the time to reduce the divergence between the two by converging the academic excellence with employability. This can be successfully done with dynamic curriculum, pedagogy and by innovation.

Mentoring and Reverse Mentoring

The teacher student relationship has much to do with the quality of management education. Right now many management Institutes have failed to realize that the teachers must be both mentors and mentees. Unless they are ready to get rid of their reluctance to learn in the process of teaching, mentoring can become both one sided and lop sided. Training for development through change in the student relationship should be one of the goals of the higher education in general and management education in particular.

Innovations in Evaluation

Increasing span of attention, quick solutions to problems at hand, reviewing education and scope for peer to peer learning should be the main steps for evaluations of both learners and teachers. Innovative evaluation therefore has to become open ended.

Distance Learning  

Distance learning is rapidly becoming an alternative to traditional classrooms. Learners are attracted by distance learning due to flexibility that comes with distance learning. Technology has been a major contributor for the success of this. The experiences across the world can be shared to assess the current status of distance learning and redefine the same if necessary.

Hybrid Learning: Conventional and Distance Education

The reduction of the in class learning and replacing that with more online, out-of-class learning is a new trend in higher education in the developed countries, but not so in emerging countries.

Reforms in Management Education

Reforms in management education should center round ability to learn in teams, converting the recipients of management education into flexible citizens of the globe, imparting the necessary skill to learners face different cultures and appreciate the nature of present knowledge centered society.

Role of Accreditation in Management Education

The accreditation for education should be purely a voluntary and non-governmental process that includes an external review of a school’s ability to provide quality programs. It should help the Institutions in many fronts, starting from ensuring that students are learning relevant material to get a special status for regulatory purpose.

Regulations on Higher Education and Role of the University System The regulatory framework should be basically different. Emphasis needs to be shifted from the control mode to development mode. In this context the advantages as well as disadvantages of the present affiliation system must be looked into. The university system should have a built-in-mechanism for giving autonomy to the institutions of the management education with adequate safeguards.

Any Other Topic

Any other topics may cover addressing the issues of absenteeism, pluralism, cross border movement of students and faculty, content development in new courses, inter-disciplinary dimensions of management education and any such related topics.