Starting to teach at IIT - The students, the courses, and the IIT system

The Students at IIT-Madras

Exactly a week after our arrival in Chennai, I started teaching my first course to the first-year MBA students at IIT. The course was “Management Information Systems” – a generic course required of all MBA students. I had taught this course a few times at Quinnipiac over the last few years. I had taken an “IT Strategy” approach in teaching this course, as the students at QU found that MIS fundamentals taught without context or clear examples of the IT scene around. I decided to take a similar approach here at IIT. I noticed that textbooks were not used by professors in general. The mode of teaching was typically lectures augmented by lecture notes. Assessment methods consist of quizzes, exams, presentations, projects and “attendance!” Students were graded on how regularly they attended classes! This reminded me of my own undergraduate days in India eons ago! Apparently, the same system continued to this day!

Of course, I dispensed with that system of grading right away, and announced to the class that attendance was not my concern – rather, it was their problem, especially since there was not going to be any text book that they could use to catch up with the classes. For the course, I used a textbook I had brought from the US – Corporate Information Systems and Strategy by Applegate, Austin and McFarlan (Harvard Business School professors). It was certainly rather intimidating to stare at a class of sixty one at eight in the morning! But I was also impressed that they all made it at that time to the class.

The students apparently found my teaching methodology “different” and “interesting.” I used lectures, audio files, videos, and movies. The course was case-study based, and I started assigning student to groups…and soon found out that these Indian students had the same hassles and reservations about working in groups as their counterparts in the US! Clearly, there were freeloaders here, too!

However, as the course started proceeding in earnest, I started noticing that the students were all incredibly well informed about the subject, and about trends in IT in the US. They also clearly were more aware of the world than their US counterparts. The students were also enthusiastic to a fault. They had no problems about attending classes at odd hours, since they all stayed on campus! Apparently some faculty members even scheduled examinations from 10:00pm until 12:00 midnight, and scheduled extra lectures on Sunday mornings! Talking of extra lectures, students were happy to come to extra classroom sessions at any time of the day or night! This was quite an odd experience to me. Of course, I did not schedule any extra classes, which went very well, too, with the students.

Talking of their work…the students prepared and presented their assigned cases with great depth. I could clearly see that they went deep into the issues and had researched their cases thoroughly, looking at library materials, company reports, web based information, and newspaper reports. The presentations were always more than what I would normally expect (and get) in US classrooms. I began to wonder if the best way to get results in the US was simply to push the students more?...Was I not pushing them enough?

The downside of teaching at IIT is that one can say ‘goodbye’ to small class sizes. The classes were typically sixty to sixty-five students. Class assessment was a chore indeed, what with grading the quizzes, exams, projects, etc. And to top it, there was no course management system at IIT-M! Apparently, IIT had a copy of Blackboard which was used only by the continuing education department to prepare and deliver courses.

I immediately created ‘blogspots’ on the web, thanks to Google, and published all my lecture notes, syllabi, and cases. The students loved this access to notes, etc. I was surprised the CMSs had not made their way into the most technological insitutte in the country!

A ‘unique’ feature at the department of management studies was that a semester was divided into quarters lasting seven weeks. Each course was worth two credits. And each faculty was required to teach six credits per semester, which basically meant three two-credit courses. I felt right from the start that this was a cop-out. My problem was that there was not much of a difference in the preparation required for a two versus a three- credit course, and thus this amounted to rushing through a three credit course in seven weeks. Thus this resulted in more course preparation and higher teaching load (as there were sixty students).

I spoke to many faculty members about this, since this course load would not typically enable them to develop a strong research agenda required in such a prestigious school. Everybody I spoke to agreed that the teaching load was high indeed, but that they could do nothing about the system which was set when the department was carved out from the humanities and sciences department about three years ago. Of course, the students are happy because they get more courses. But this does affect the research productivity of the faculty!

More on the IIT system later…