Management lectures from Bollywood: XIM-B course draws inspiration from Chak De, Swadesh

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MBAUniverse.com News Desk |
July 25, 2016
Management training shouldn't just be based on dull and drab books and journals. In the current academic year, Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar (XIM-B) is trying out a new concept.

As a part of the 'Community Mobilisation and Institution Building' course offered by XIM-B in its second year of Rural Management programme, XIMB has included case study in the form of mainstream Bollywood films like Swades, Chak De India and Manthan.  

The course attempts to relate the film's characters to the theory, says XIM-B. The students are asked to watch the movie before coming to class. During the class itself, intermediate clippings of important moments in the film are shown. This leads to greater class participation, and boosts the students' understanding of the subject, as the films have a long-lasting effect on their memories, due to the effective use of the visual medium.  

Prof. Niraj Kumar, the faculty conducting the course said that due to the introduction of such 'edutainment' measures, there has been a marked improvement in the efficiency of his teaching methodology. He now has the attention of the class for the full 90 minutes, as opposed the average attention span of 20-30 minutes, prior to the introduction of these measures. 

The course has also been well received by the students, informs XIM-B. The institute is consistently getting positive feedback from the students about this course, since its introduction in the current form. Similar use of movies as part of pedagogy has been done in a few courses of the Business Management course as well. Perhaps, this is why XIM-B is considering introducing this form of case study in its other courses conducted as a part of the Rural Management programme and its flagship Business Management programme.  

Shirshendu Chatterjee, a second year Rural Management student at XIM-B said that, "Management is essentially experiential learning. Introduction of measures like use of films as case studies helps to make the programme more interesting for us students. At the same time, the fact that the films are popular Bollywood movies doesn't hurt because they also provide good entertainment value. Such measures should be introduced across the board, wherever possible, as it will serve to make management education more interesting and a lot more fun too."