The decision to Open Source my courseware

While pursuing both my MBA and my PhD, I had observed professors (and visiting faculty) often reuse their question papers from previous years. Consequently, the students who had access to previous year question papers had an edge over others. More often than not, these papers were circulated selectively and good students who did not belong to those groups suffered (we had relative grading).

Now that I am on the other side of the equation, I can see how reusing question papers can be a major time saver. But what it will also prove to be is a major set back to me as a faculty. I truly believe that I should give my students my full and therefore set up different question papers every year. In the spirit of accomplishing that, I have decided to open source my ‘courseware’ after the end of every course I teach. I see myself deriving several benefits due to this action. First, open sourcing my work would nudge me to create new content in preparation for every time I walk into class. This way, I can no longer just copy past from the past (entirely). Second, I honestly feel that this will open me up to a different level of critique from my readers). This would in turn make me better as an educator. Third, this may help future faculty learn from my rights and wrongs. Which, in my opinion, is pretty cool. and last, I believe this will serve as a signal and learning tool for my future students.

So, here it goes. I present to you the first ever question paper I have set. I am going to try writing a proper answer key for the questions and make that available to you as well. Let me find some time for that. In the meanwhile, please drop in your comments on the question paper. (P.S. I personally think the product life cycle is useless. As one of my favourite professors of all times put it, “PLC is BS, you can old plot it for something that’s dead and gives managers no agency”. So, for question 5, I would have given full marks if someone said PLC is BS)

Have a great week ahead guys!