Prof. Basav Roychoudhury, Faculty at IIM-Shillong, has been voted by the students of IIM-Shillong as the InsideIIM Professor of The Year 2020! Last year, he shared this title with Prof. Sanjeeb Kakoty. Prof. Roychoudhury is a great academician with a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering. He has been teaching at IIM Shillong since the institute was founded. He is currently an Associate Professor For Information Systems at IIM Shillong. Armed with a PhD degree in Computer Science and Engineering, Prof. Roychoudhury’s teaches courses on business intelligence & analytics, business modelling using spreadsheets, data mining and data warehousing, enterprise resource planning (ERP), IT tools for managers, management information systems, spreadsheet macros for modelling, etc. This article is an interview excerpt of Prof. Roychoudhury. Here he talks in detail about his experience as a Professor at one of India’s top IIMs, teaching some of the brightest minds in the country. Read to know more.
Here is what IIM Shillong students have to say about Prof. Basav Roychoudhury!
What is the best part about teaching these future leaders in your classroom?
It is indeed fortunate to be able to meet so many of these future leaders in the classroom and outside in an Institute like ours. It is and has been a great opportunity to learn from them while discussing within the class and beyond with them. They keep one on one’s toes, and ensure that the motivation to excel in one’s job is kept alive, always.
Your students have praised you for the interesting ways in which you teach your classes to make studies interesting. How important do you think this approach is for the students to cope with the real world out there?
It is our responsibility as course instructors or facilitators to reach, ideally, every student in the classroom, though honestly, I realise that there have been times when I have failed to do full justice to this requirement, and might not have been able to reach all the participants in the way I wanted to. In order to reach them, it is important to keep their interest alive and at the same time, keep the course challenging for them, especially when we are dealing with such an intelligent group of students. Thus, the pedagogy adopted plays a very important role. I personally do not vouch for any one pedagogical approach, but believe that we have to change our approach based on the feedback, explicit, but more importantly, the implicit ones, to keep the interest of the students alive in the class, in the course, and in the program.
Cases, real-life examples, academic models/theories, projects with peers – Which method, according to you, is most effective in teaching your subject to students?
As I had mentioned in the previous question, it is not any one single method that works all the time. With the idea of ‘bias towards action’, I love experimenting with an amalgam of various methodologies. As an instructor, I understand that I need to ensure that the discussions in the class are relevant, and to ensure that the students will be able to apply whatever is being discussed in real life. Thus, real-life examples/projects, simulations, cases and assignments mimicking real-life scenarios, all play important roles in putting the theories in proper perspectives.
How has the use of technology transformed the modern MBA classroom?
It has made a huge difference. Of course, due to COVID-19 crisis, many classes, meetings. etc. have moved online. But even before this happened, technology had and has been continuously transforming the MBA classroom. For many years, I had been using a forum (using learning management system) for each of my courses, where all the participants in the course, which definitely includes me, can discuss and learn from one another. There had been many times when the students, in their feedback, had acknowledged the learning that they had over such forums. Such forums transform the system from one instructor to say, 61 instructors in a class of 60 students. We can learn from each other’s experiences. While this is surely possible without technology through discussions in class, the advantage that technology brings in is that of scalability - everyone has equal opportunity and much more time to participate in such forums as they are not bound by class timings. Technology has also allowed me to experiment with peer evaluation of projects and assignments, which again has allowed us to learn for one another’s strengths and weaknesses. These are just two of the examples, and there are many more such experiences that technology has enabled us to have.
How do you feel when you see people whom you have taught become successful in their lives and conquer the professional world out there?
It is the best experience ever, even more than one’s own successes. This is also a great motivator for people in our profession to carry on. I would not trade my profession with anything else, majorly because of this experience.
Give us one student’s story that you have closely followed or tell us about that one student who had amazing growth during their MBA and surprised you.
I have had the fortune of seeing so many of them doing amazingly well, and thus I would not like to mention any single one of them leaving out the others. The people I meet in class are the ones with immense potential and commitment, and thus it is but natural that they would grow. Moreover, all of them commit huge resources in terms of time, money and many others when they come for such MBA programs. The surprise only comes when one does not grow to their potential, and this mostly happens when one fails to maintain the level of commitment with which one came in for the program. However, I would especially like to mention about certain students who felt like leaving the program within the first month of initiation but, with a little nudge, focused all their energies and completed the program successfully. Such experiences reinforce the belief in the capabilities of the students.
What are the kind of changes/developments that you see in the B-school curriculum in the years to come
Schools like ours have been quite agile in bringing up frequent changes in the curriculum based on the changes in the environment. In terms of functional knowledge, we have been doing, I believe, quite a good job. It is the other knowledge – the knowledge of humility and humanity – is what I feel needs to come in more prominently within the campuses. As for the first one - it is very important for people passing out of schools like ours to know how to learn, and to be a lifelong learner, and being able to learn from any one around. The second one is about ethics and empathy, without those the life is not worth living. The challenge for business schools is how to impart these qualities as a part of the curriculum, or rather, how to ensure that those who pass out of our institutions imbibe these qualities. I believe most of us are searching for answers.
What, according to you, are some of the qualities that an aspiring B-school student must possess?
The journey through a business school is more important than the destination (the degree). Thus, one needs to get in with an open mind, with the zeal and commitment, and with the honest purpose to learn. While this might be true in most cases, this is more important in a business school – the degree might land one in a job, but to excel in that, one will need to have skills and knowledge, taught within and beyond, in a business school. Everyone comes in with the zeal and commitment, but remaining honest to the purpose and maintaining the required level of commitment as going gets tough often becomes challenging.
What are your thoughts about InsideIIM’s Professor of the Year initiative?
I honestly do not know how to answer this question. It indeed is a humbling experience to be loved by one’s students, and let me be honest - it does feel great. It also reminds one to count one’s blessings. However, it might not always be very easy to evaluate an instructor in a short time span of a course, or even the program. Someday, long after one has graduated, one may realise that the points raised by one ‘not so good professor’ in one of the ‘not such interesting sessions’ is actually one of the most valuable lessons of life. As an instructor, we all try to be honest with our profession and try our best within our limited capacities; whether and when we become successful in touching the lives of our students is not always discovered within a short span of time.
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