Case Teaching: Emerging Challenges and New Perspectives

With time business schools in the west are having a relook at relevance of Case Method of teaching as a pedagogical tool in a changing business and classroom environment. With the advent of new skill sets, teachers and students over the decades, this article has a relook at case teaching in the post graduate management programme in the Indian context. Question is if case teaching focusses on those faculties of students like systematic enquiry and rigorous reasoning in unstructured situations that simulate closely the real life situation faced by managers, why is the popularity of case method as a teaching tool waning? Has it got to do with suitably modifying case teaching to take cognizance of the changing needs of business with the advent of new tools like information technology (IT) and multimedia? Its impact on role of teacher, student, testing and administration needs to be discussed. Whereas cases have to be representative of the unique local conditions and be up to date, data utilization from Internet and other sources should not allow focus to shift from in-depth analytical decisions to sheer data collection due to easy availability. Consulting opportunities of case teachers should be used to write new cases. The challenge in case discussions is to retain a holistic perspective even when IT based communication is distancing teacher and student by taking both away from class room situations. Validity and replicability of an online system for testing, particularly in subjective case studies is a big challenge for case teaching. Much of the above have to be done under pressures of increasing class size and scarcity of infrastructure due to the increasing demand for business administration degree. Institutes however continue to be rated differently based on the attitude of teacher and student. Impact will also be in the ethical standards students bring to society as managers.