(Photo credit: David Reece)

Jamshedpur’s Xavier’s Labour Relations Institute, now known as XLRI Jamshedpur School of Business and Human Resources will implement a revised curriculum for students joining the two-year Business Management (BM) and Personnel Management and Industrial Relations (PMIR) programs in June 2010. The new curriculum would reduce the number of contact hours in both BM and PMIR from 1230 to 1050 hours. The idea is to make time for more projects and fieldwork and implement the 2009 AICTE guidelines for PGDM programs by bringing down the classroom hours, said XLRI’s Prof Madhukar Shukla.

Of the 1050 hours, the institute would devote 630 hours to the core courses and 420 to elective courses in both the BM and PMIR programs. Effectively, it would mean 570 hours of classes in the first year and 480 hours in the second year. The number of electives on offer would remain unchanged.

According to Prof Shukla, who teaches Organizational Behavior and Strategic Management at XLRI, the new curriculum also reduces overlapping content between a few courses and frees up time for students to spend more time doing field activities.

An institute report on the course restructuring says, “While students are required to spend 30 hours per course in the classroom, they also need to spend 70 hours per course outside the class for class preparation, case analysis, assignments and term papers.” According to the institute, adhering to this guideline would increase the students’ gain from the course.

While in BM the number of core courses have been brought down to 22, in PMIR they now stand at 21. The institute has combined a few courses and removed overlapping content from existing courses in order to achieve this. For example, it has clubbed the Fundamentals of Management and HR and Fundamentals of Labour Laws into one course titled Fundamentals of HR and Labour Laws. Similarly, the new ‘Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility’ course is a combination of last year’s Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility as Business Strategy.

While the elective courses on offer remain more or less the same, the number of electives allowed have been reduced from 18 to 14. Students wishing to study more courses over and above the 14 would need to pay Rs 3,000 per full-credit course.

The second-year of MBA in business schools is known to be less rigorous than the first. With the electives cut-down further, would the rigor of the programs diminish? Prof Shukla explains that the decrease in classroom time will be made-up by increased depth and number of assignments and projects in each of the electives taught. He also adds, “All of us in the faculty wanted students to go to the field more frequently. There are many opportunities in the industries in and around Jamshedpur for students to take up field projects with.”

While Jamshedpur is an industrial enclave, the town may not present field-work opportunities for all electives, such as those in areas of Finance that have industry manifestations only in Mumbai or New Delhi. To this, Prof Shukla says, “I agree that we have a traditional locational disadvantage in this regard. It gets addressed by ideas such as one by a professor who organized a full-day trading center on the campus where students were brokers and investors. On a few occasions students have been known to go to Kolkata for projects too.”

The XLRI course restructuring report concludes that the revised curriculum will free up time for the faculty to engage in research, while allowing time for students to submit ‘quality work’.