Academics as a Profession: Environmental Change

Tapping this opportunity brought through environmental change:

• The existing faculty members need to constantly update themselves in this area. Imagine a situation wherein you are 10 years way behind your students who tell you the "latest" happening in the management area! Be it in research methods, application software, pedagogy or course content, information technology has changed the world like never before. While this change can be a bit daunting, it brings in its wake, a great opportunity. Be it MOOC, Khanacademy, free software like R for analysis, life can become better.

• The best way for faculty members to keep themselves abreast is to make use of the IT revolution to stay in touch with peers via social network, attend faculty development sessions online and most importantly, ensure that the massive quality content that is available online be made use of to the fullest extent. In short, resources are available for free, mentors are reachable at the click of a mouse and therefore how well we make use of it makes all the difference.

• The next set of articles in this series carries detailed insights into how faculty members can tap the changing environment to their advantage.

The author, Dr. Samir Kagalkar is an alumnus of IIM Bangalore's Fellowship program. He is the Director and cofounder of an education firm, eMBArkers (www.embarkers.in), which aims at "building bandwidth in management education". He can be reached at [email protected]