(Photo credit: Hillie Kootstra)

As many as 15 bills related to education are slated to be introduced in the monsoon session underway at the parliament. The two most critical among them is the act which will allow foreign universities to function in India and a set of laws that will make way for special courts to resolve education-related disputes. The Mint lists the bills,

” Universities for innovation Bill: To set up special universities with a focus on innovation and research

National Academic Depository Bill: To create an electronic repository of education certificates to curb forgery

National Council for Higher Education and Research Bill: To create an overarching body replacing regulators like the University Grants Commission and the All India Council for Technical Education

Foreign Educational Institutions Bill: To be reintroduced after the standing committee report

Prohibition of unfair practices Bill: To be reintroduced after the standing committee report

Education Tribunal Bill: Passed by Lok Sabha, to be taken up by Rajya Sabha”

Those of you interested in tracking the Foreign Educational Institutions Bill should look out for the Lok Sabha or Rajya Sabha debates about the act on television or the live webcast. Track the newspapers regularly so that you do not miss out on the date on which it would be tabled.

For all the push towards frugal innovation, Indian b-schools waste multi-acre campuses by churning out MBA graduates below their capacity, argues Nirmalya Kumar, a professor from London Business School in s thought-provoking column in The Economic Times. He contends,

“Yes, India does have a reputation for frugal engineering; but do the IIMs, or for that matter, the IITs or JNU, display this? Here we were on the London Business School campus that is about five acres, with another shared classroom in Dubai, yet we graduated over 1,000 degree students this year and, combined with executive education , generated about $118 million 47 million and 27 million from degree and executive education programmes respectively in revenues last year.

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Compare this with the oldest IIMs at Ahmedabad (100 acres), Calcutta (135 acres) and Bangalore (100 acres ), or the more-recently-established Lucknow (185 acres), Kozhikode (97 acres), Indore (193 acres) and Shillong (120 acres), which, if Wikipedia numbers are to be believed, graduate a combined total of 2,750 MBAs.”

Case studies adopt tablets

B-schools in the US have begun to harness tablet devices to transform the way case studies are taught and delivered. The tablet-converted case studies aren’t mere digitized PDFs; they contain menus to enable jumping back and forth between text and embedded exhibits in their simplest form to active apps in which the values of variables can change on the fly during a classroom for a professor to implement simulation exercises in their more advanced forms. Businessweek reports that Harvard Business School plans to convert 17,000 case study documents to tablet-enhanced format by 2013. However, tablet case studies pose problems too,

“Students and professors who have used it for case studies say the device isnt great for exercises that require hard data analysis or spreadsheets. And if business schools introduce apps, as Stern did, they must provide tech support, which may intimidate schools that lack sufficient resources.

Harvard Business Publishings Betses also notes that her team wont be creating note-taking tools for students to use within their tablet-enhanced documents. For that, she says users may have to use a third-party app.”

B-school Deans aren’t all stern-faced puritans. They love Hollywood too! Businessweek last month asked the Deans of top US b-schools the names of movies they would recommend b-school applicants and students. Here is list of Top 30 movies B-school Deans recommend. While some movies in the list contain a moral undercurrent, recommendations such as The Inside Job are interesting because the documentary indicts top academics of the b-schools at Harvard and Columbia universities for their role in the 2008 recession.