The iconic Harvard Business School (HBS) celebrates 2021 as the centennial year of its case study method of management education. Ever since the first case on General Shoe Company in 1921 was used for classroom discussion, there has been no looking back for HBS which continuously evolved itself and also reshaped the contours of management education worldwide.
In this 100-year period, the case study method created varied milestones that not only touched the learning lives of students at HBS but also many students outside the HBS orbit through the Harvard Business Publishing, a wholly owned subsidiary of HBS that annually sells 15 million cases worldwide.
Even after 100 years, my alma mater HBS questions the relevance of case study and the need to further improvise it to meet the aspirations of a global learner community. Not only HBS constantly engaged in the improvisation of case study methodology but also wrote a case on the future of HBS in the growing relevance of online education.
I distinctly remember as a student discussing inside the HBS classroom in which the protagonist of the case, the HBS Professor, questions the brick and mortar future of HBS over the bits and bytes model of HBS Online called HBX. Today, both models co-exist at HBS not as competing but complimenting forces.
As HBS celebrates its centenary anniversary, Facebook delivered its Meta baby to bring the Metaverse to life connecting people and communities socially for immersive experiences that mimic real-time. Other corporates like Microsoft and Nvidia have started scripting their own meta-versions. This transition into the cyber-physical realm is going to be critical and may reshape various models of engagement, including teaching-learning.
Are all educational institutions worldwide functioning in an autogenous self-evolutionary mode like HBS which changed constantly to meet growing demands of learners and industry? With the pressure to build a robust online platform in education, do all educational institutions need to shift to online mode completely? Is there a hybrid model that builds on the best foundations of both?
More questions like these confront academics, education administrators and policy-makers globally. In this avalanche of questions coming hard and fast, there can be no standstill response and at the same time we cannot jump ski with a short-term response. At this crossroads of education, higher education requires comprehensive policy and institutional strategy.
The Institute of Public Policy Research (UK) in 2013 published a report titled 'An Avalanche is Coming' in which it identified the challenges ahead for higher education, not only in the US or the UK, but also for the world. In the Foreword for this report, legendary Lawrence Summers states, "The one thing you don't do in the path of an avalanche is stand still!"
Standing still is never an option when university education, as per the report, is getting unbundled into various forms of universities - elite, mass, niche, local, lifelong learning.
In this unbundling of university education lies the countless opportunities for rebundling university education for the emerging paradigms of the 21st century. Governments, university administrators, academics, students and all critical stakeholders must bear in mind that as campuses are gearing up to open their face-to-face classes, the hybrid learning that blends men and machine in a data and voice highway should not only be capable of handling the voluminous traffic but also make it accident-free, for accidents in hybrid education make teaching-learning the irreversible casualty.
At this critical juncture, there is no way universities can prevent students from receiving nor faculty from delivering online education. They need to prepare themselves by conceptualising a digital twin model fully leveraging the policy avenues provided by the All India Council for Technical Education or the University Grants Commission. Though their current levels of 40 percent online seem to be on the higher and questionable side, starting slow and moving steady is ideal as universities undertake this major transformation.
To reach 40 per cent online need not be the mandatory target but to remain non-zero is definitely a mandatory minimum with the realisation that it's not a duel between conventional and online or physical and digital but an emerging coherent synergy to build phygital education in which we need twinning czars and not warring twins.
(The writer is Vice-Chancellor, SASTRA Deemed University and can be contacted at vaidhya@sastra.edu)