Bhubaneswar: In the current academic year, Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar is trying out a fairly new concept. As a part of the ‘Community Mobilisation and Institution Building’ course offered by XIMB in its Second Year 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. 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.

Media houses like NDTV have shown interest in covering this course so that the entire country can be apprised of the benefits arising out of such innovative introductions. NDTV has also filmed an entire course session for airing in its feature section on NDTV 24x7, NDTV Profit and NDTV India channels.

The course has also been well received by the students. XIMB 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 XIMB 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 XIMB 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.” Indeed, this may be the case sooner rather than later.