A distinguished academic, Dr. Rajani Gupte has been actively engaged with higher education for over thirty years, both as a professor and researcher, and also has taught at many foreign universities.

The MBA graduates who are going to lead the industry must possess skill sets to adapt, manage, and to take advantage of Industry 4.0. The trends of Industry 4.0 have brought path breaking changes to manufacturing, production, operations and supply chain. In the present day scenario, cyber physical systems can communicate, collaborate in real time to control processes and add value to the business information value chain. With these rapid changes in the business processes, the challenge in the future would not be lack of employment, but would certainly be shortage of people who have the necessary knowledge and skills that the new jobs will demand. Are the Universities, Engineering Colleges and BSchools changing their curriculum to address this challenge? Are the students being trained to be innovative and not be rote learning experts? The answer to the question is debatable.



Several best Universities and B-Schools are bringing changes to their curriculum and are grooming students to be leaders who can not only bring path breaking changes, but also manage and tackle challenges brought to business from all parts of the globe. Some universities have made experiential learning a compulsory component to be included in courses, which can help students to learn from experience. Changes in curriculum are evident. Engineering colleges are introducing courses like B. Tech in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, B.Tech Robotics Engineering, B.Tech in Data Science and B-Schools are bringing subjects like R Programming and Programming using Python as mandatory subjects to be taken by all graduates.

While the curriculum is being changed and teaching is getting transformed, faculty members are using tools of artificial intelligence to understand the learning patterns of students to make the learning experience a value add to the learners. This is creating personalized and adaptive learning possible and is bringing individualized approach that takes learner diversity, performance and behaviour into account. Assessment is being reimagined and gaming is being used to make assessment stress free.

While the curriculum is being changed and teaching is getting transformed, faculty members are using tools of artificial intelligence to understand the learning patterns of students to make the learning experience a value add to the learners. This is creating personalized and adaptive learning possible and is bringing individualized approach that takes learner diversity, performance and behavior into account. Assessment is being reimagined and gaming is being used to make assessment stress free.

The need for more practical life skills among the learners has been understood by many universities. The appreciation of these changes has compelled several private and deemed universities to be more agile and responsive to the changing times. Gone are the days when the program structures offered limited flexibility for learners to choose their areas of focus.Today, flexibility and cafeteria approach give students an opportunity to study courses aligned with or outside of their core area of interest.

Students and employers are opening up to the idea of non traditional means of learning. Several universities are creating alternate program offerings, which offer learning blended with student experience, challenging the next level of education. This is clearly visible in the shift in enrolment patterns across the variety of learning methods, where the traditional on campus enrolments are decreasing in the US, while selfdriven MOOCs and online courses see a strong growth. In the past, universities had a monopoly in knowledge creation and dissemination, creating exclusivity for the people who passed through them, and today that monopoly is disappearing. Classrooms were relatively isolated and collaboration usually happened within the confines of the classrooms, and today global collaborations in teaching learning are becoming common, creating an opportunity for students and faculty to bring in wider perspectives.

Some universities have made experiential learning a Compulsory component to be included in courses, which can help students to learn from experience

The need for more practical life skills among the learners has been understood by many universities. The appreciation of these changes has compelled several private and deemed universities to be more agile and responsive to the changing times. Gone are the days when the program structures offered limited flexibility for learners to choose their areas of focus. Today, flexibility and cafeteria approach give students an opportunity to study courses aligned with or outside of their core area of interest.

Students and employers are opening up to the idea of non traditional means of learning. Several universities are creating alternate program offerings, which offer learning blended with student experience, challenging the next level of education. This is clearly visible in the shift in enrolment patterns across the variety of learning methods, where the traditional on-campus enrolments are decreasing in the US, while self-driven MOOCs and online courses see a strong growth. In the past, universities had a monopoly in knowledge creation and dissemination, creating exclusivity for the people who passed through them, and today that monopoly is disappearing. Classrooms were relatively isolated and collaboration usually happened within the confines of the classrooms, and today global collaborations in teaching learning are becoming common, creating an opportunity for students and faculty to bring in wider perspectives.

In their quest for pure knowledge, many Indian universities had distanced research from the society around them and the industry, which was the consumer for knowledge being generated. As a result, the curricula became more theoretical, without preparing a workforce for the industry or creating tangible research output, which could be quickly commercialized by the industry. In the past couple of years, this has significantly changed. Many private & deemed universities have revised their curriculum and aspects related to experiential learning have been included in the curricula, which forces both faculty members and students to be connected with real world both society and industry needs. In the past, students emerging from a rote learning system had a foundation and depth in the subjects of their study but lacked real world application knowledge or the creative skills that are sought by employers in rapidly changing industries today. With technology greatly impacting learning of these foundation concepts, several universities have augmented their curriculum to address these life skills to remain relevant.

There is still a lot of scope for improvement. The most prevalent model of teaching today the fixed term structure of the educational programs of today with instructions delivered by a faculty, where everyone is expected to learn the same thing at the same pace, needs to change, as it does not meet the learners’ expectations. Universities have to accept that no two learners are alike and they have different expectations and varied levels of preparedness for a concept or a course. If the same level of difficulty and pace of teaching is used by instructors for different learners, none of the learners will be able to meet their learning objectives. For highly motivated learners, the learning experience is sub optimal and they are not able to progress in their learning objectives. Similarly, for learners with low interest toward a subject, teaching is ineffective as they may need the instructor to start at more basic levels to help them learn the subject. The use of technology could help in creating the workforce that can be trained to be gainfully employed at different levels.