Learning Experience at VPSM: What Sets It Apart?

Vijay Patil School of Management (VPSM) seeks to be on par with the best universities across the globe in terms of delivering real-time, relevant learning to students and making them career-ready. What sets it apart? The School has collaborated with Harvard Business School in two ways: Firstly, it collaborated with HBS Online and offered thirty Harvard-certified online courses spread across the domains of entrepreneurship, innovation, strategy, finance and accounting, marketing, leadership and management. Secondly, in addition to the online courses from Harvard, it has procured unlimited access to Harvard cases and articles that ensure seamless integration of theory with practice. The collaboration with the Harvard Business School was a step towards imparting learning beyond the four walls of the classroom and ensuring the development of new business capabilities that help one stay relevant in this dynamic business environment.

Pedagogy of HBS Online courses

Students at VPSM have to mandatorily undergo HBS Online courses across all semesters. These courses are designed to bring the actual Harvard classroom experience in front of you.  What differentiates an HBS Online course from typical online courses?

1. Faculty: All the courses are taught by renowned Harvard faculties or practitioners across the globe. Beyond their academic credentials and in-depth exploration of concepts; students will also leverage a lot from the discussion of tools, frameworks and best practices. Case-based learning and interactions facilitate the application and experimentation of newly learned concepts to new situations.
2. Interaction with the global cohort: The innovative online platform gives ample opportunities to interact with students spread across the globe. The student profile includes business professionals in their early, mid or later careers, entrepreneurs and academicians. You can share information, collaborate, negotiate with this global cohort and build long-lasting connections with them. HBS Online communities that are formed during the course enrolment are very active and vibrant. The advantages of networking and social learning opportunities are worth exploring for student’s career advancement.
3. Active learning. Every course seeks to provide an immersive learning experience to its students. The pedagogy includes activities every few minutes so that the learner's involvement and contribution are guaranteed. The frequent polls, quizzes and problem-solving exercises facilitate active interaction with the student and the global cohort. This active learning experience undoubtedly widens the knowledge frontiers by questioning the existing mental models.
4.  Harvard certification: Every course is self-paced; it is divided into multiple modules spread over six to eight weeks. In a nutshell, it is a program that is known for its academic rigour and discipline. Hence, students are expected to approach this course with a lot of vigour and passion. In order to earn a certificate of completion, students must thoughtfully complete all the modules, capstone projects/assignments/exercises within the stated deadlines. 

Scope of HBS Online Course

Vijay Patil School of Management (VPSM) offers thirty online courses in the domains of entrepreneurship, innovation, strategy, finance and accounting, marketing, leadership and management.

1. Courses on business essentials: The basic purpose of these courses is to train learners on how to make sense of data and make informed decisions. The foundational courses on “economics”, “business analytics” and “financial accounting” largely target the beginners in management.
2. Courses on leadership and management: In this domain, a few courses such as “Management Essentials” and “Leadership Principles” are positioned at the beginner level. However, courses such as “organizational leadership”, “strategy execution”, and “negotiation mastery” are positioned at an advanced level. These courses seek to develop the leader in students and help them explore the responsibilities of leaders towards multiple stakeholders.
3. Courses on entrepreneurship and innovation: Courses such as “Disruptive Strategy”, “Design Thinking and Innovation” and “Entrepreneurship Essentials” systematically help students navigate the transformational journey from an idea to a viable venture.
4. Courses on business in society: Courses in this domain help students stay relevant amidst the challenges in the external world. “Business and climate change” is a course newly introduced by Harvard; it caters to the impending need of the business world to combine purpose with profitability. Similar courses that address the evolving business needs are “sustainable business strategy, “sustainable investing” and “global business”.
5. Domain-specific courses: In addition to the courses that cater to the demands of the dynamic business landscape, students also get an opportunity to explore various domain-specific courses like “digital marketing strategy”, “alternative investments”, “financial accounting”, “business strategy, “strategy execution” etc. These domain-specific courses facilitate in-depth exploration of concepts, frameworks and best practices in the student domain(s) of interest.

Curriculum Integrated with Harvard Business Publishing House:

VPSM has also partnered with Harvard Business School Publishing (HBSP) to ensure experiential learning for our students. It adopted the following innovative pedagogies from Harvard and integrated with the school’s existing course curriculum:

• Harvard Case Studies: VPSM provides unlimited access to cases, podcasts, multi-media cases, industry readings, and articles from HBSP. Faculties across courses ensure that the concepts discussed in class are put under scrutiny and experimentation for relevance, applicability and generalizability with the help of Harvard cases and articles. The School judiciously ensure a relatively flexible curriculum embedded with real-time cases and readings from HBSP.
• Harvard Simulations: Gamification is found to enhance the engagement and absorptive capacity of students. The School uses simulations from Harvard Business Publishing House to enrich the student learning experience. These simulations expose students to real-life business scenarios wherein they need to experiment with the theory they have learned and make difficult decisions under pressure.
• Harvard Manage Mentor (HMM) courses: HMM are short online courses offered by Harvard in contemporary business topics. Similar to HBS Online courses, HHM courses are undertaken by management experts both in academia and the practitioner world. The purpose of HMM is to ensure that students are cognizant of the latest in business thinking.

To summarise, VPSM seeks to bring the “Harvard experience to our classrooms” by integrating with various offerings from Harvard Business School. The School looks forward to more collaborations to ensure that their students stay apart from the rest in terms of business acumen, entrepreneurship, sensible leadership, and community impact.