PGDM Finance at IMT Nagpur – Shaping the future for global financial markets

The financial sector world-wide has suffered two big shocks of the century –  the financial crisis of 2007-08 and Covid-19 since year 2020. The financial crisis of 2007-08 has made deans and faculty of finance in various business schools world-wide to rethink about the risk management in finance. The impact was also on the extensive new regulations in the financial sector. This made finance programs and courses to incorporate the regulations and its impact on the processes and management of finance functions in various financial institutions ranging from banks, investment banking, trading firms to hedge funds. The financial crisis laid bare the greed and unethical practices in the financial sector. The finance courses, thus, also started laying more emphasis on values and ethics in finance.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the corporate sector, in particular has brought to light the impact on the closure of every aspect of the value chain in this connected global economy. The risk of a world-wide crisis, never thought of before –  a Black Swan event, has made corporate world awake to a new reality and way of life.

Apart from embracing quickly to the new realities like teaching online using various online platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc. to teach, the finance faculty members at IMT Nagpur has made several changes both to its course contents and delivery. Based on various discussions with its Alumni at several senior position in several industries, the finance faculty has made several changes to its course contents laying emphasis on developing several new skills required post-Covid business environment, especially in area of data science.

To increase the engagement of the students during the class, the faculty members are increasingly using the flipped classrooms in their delivery.  In flipped classrooms, important theoretical concepts are flipped outside the classroom hours where students study those concepts beforehand so as to focus more on practical aspects of the topic. This reduces boredom in the online classes. A hybrid teaching environment is developed by finance faculty members depending on the their subject they teach –  mini-cases, discussion of real-world situations/cases, numerical solving using MS-Excel, etc. The finance faculty have introduced new papers like financial econometrics, etc. using emerging programming languages like Python which is more easy to learn and teach in an online environment.

The faculty members have incorporated more of Excel-based exercises in their courses to suit the online learning mode, along with the sharing of various online resources ranging from YouTube material to specialized videos and simulations dealing with their subject topics.

A majority of finance courses have now more modified projects/assignment and flexible submission dates. Many projects involving group activities are given so as to keep students engaged among themselves also.

Faculty members are continuously engaged in learning new methods of teaching-learning and student engagement through various courses, articles, and online faculty development programs as online teaching and learning is going to be a norm in the coming years.