The full paper can be accessed at  http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/detail?accno=ED524206

The full paper is available at  http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/detail?accno=ED524205

 “The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done – men who are creative, inventive and discoverers.” – Jean Piaget

 Worlds of ‘engineering profession’ as well as ‘higher education’ have been gradually undergoing some very significant transformations. Prof. Crawley from MIT and his coauthors of “Rethinking engineering education: the CDIO approach“ have given a very convincing definition of engineer – “A professional engineer is the one who has attained and continuously enhances technical, communications, and human relations knowledge, skills, and attitudes, and who contributes effectively to society by theorizing, conceiving, developing, and producing reliable structures and machines of practical and economic value.” They also   argue that engineering education must engage students to develop and nurture their ability to Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate complex value-added engineering products, processes, and systems in a modern team-based environment.

Prof. Borodogna, former IEEE president has coined the term “holistic engineering” and called for a more cross-disciplinary, whole systems approach to engineering education. Catherine Koshland, Vice Provost for Academic Planning at UC Berkeley has posited that technological interventions cannot succeed, if they are applied without cultural and social understanding. In 2008, Figueiredo proposed that engineering profession as well as its epistemology consist of following four dimensions:

1. Engineering as application of natural and exact sciences, with logic and rigour, through analysis and experimentation. The major aspiration in this dimension is the discovery of first principles.
2. The dimension of engineering as human sciences sees engineers not only as technologists, but also as social experts, managers, and businesspeople who recognize the social complexity of the world and markets they act upon and of the teams they belong to. The creation of social and economic value and the belief in the satisfaction of end users emerge as central values in this dimension.
3. The design dimension sees engineering as design. It values systems thinking much more than analytical thinking. Its practice is founded on holistic, contextual, and integrated visions of the world rather than on partial visions. It includes four categories of – functional analysis, problem solving, problem setting, and evolutionary learning. Typical values of the design dimension include compromising, resorting when necessary to non-scientific thinking, and deciding on the face of incomplete knowledge with the help of intuition and experience.
4. The dimension of engineering as a craft refers to the art of getting things done. It values the ability to change the world and overcome resistance and ambiguity.

In modern world, problem “understanding and defining” has become at least as much important as problem “solving.” The new era of mass customization demands social interaction of large numbers of engineers with public. The 21^st century complex and interdisciplinary systems harness the power of “engineering thought” to issues related to technology, law, public policy, sustainability, government, industry, and the arts.  High complexity of contemporary challenges has significantly enhanced the need of systems perspective. Because of the several reasons like increased focus on usability and the need to avoid unintended consequences, the contextual competence has become as much important as conceptual or technical competence.  Consequently, the importance of breadth of thinking and interdisciplinary approaches has increased manifold.

Prof. Carol Christ, President of Smith College has identified seven challenges for engineering education – movement away from subject matter to intellectual capacities as an organising concept, inter-disciplinarity, internationalization, increasing emphasis on training for citizenship, environmental education, increased focus on undergraduate research, and increased focus on project-based learning. David Goldberg, a distinguished professor at UIUC has posited that the popular tendency to view maths, science, and engineering science as “the basics” is inconsistent with the needs of modern engineering practice and innovative ability. He has suggested that engineering education needs to change its thoughts, language, and practices to make seven thinking skills as the “new basics” of engineering education. These thinking skills are – asking questions, labelling technology and design challenges, modelling problems qualitatively, decomposing design problems, gathering data, visualizing solutions and generating ideas, and communicating solutions in written and oral forms.

In India, the traditional programs for engineering students generally aim to impart a predefined and fixed amount of established knowledge, concepts, and skills and lack the emphasis on exploration and diversified pedagogical activities. On the other hand, the current thinking in education is towards making the educational process more learner-centric, exploratory and activity based. Worldwide the universities are trying to become more flexible and learner centric in terms of their educational objectives, content, and processes.

A report (2005)  “Educating the Engineer for 2020” by National Academy of Engineers (NAE), USA, gives following recommendations that provide some very useful insights for curriculum design:

1. The engineering education must adopt a broader view of the value of an engineering education to include providing a “liberal” education to those students who wish to use it as a springboard for other career pursuits.
2. Introduce interdisciplinary learning in the undergraduate environment.
3. The essence of engineering—the iterative process of designing, predicting performance, building, and testing—should be taught throughout the curriculum starting from the first year itself.

The “Liberal” education model insists on broad based undergraduate education. A liberating curriculum is expected to enhance social, moral, political, intellectual, and spiritual faculties of students. Interdisciplinary courses are required to make explicit connections in the technical world and society. In US normally only 30-40% credits are required to be earned in a specific discipline to complete the requirements of major in that discipline. The remaining credits are earned through broad based courses. At many top universities, e.g. Stanford University, the students are encouraged to explore diverse areas and not required to prematurely declare their major before their 3^rd year.  In India too, recently Ambedkar University, Delhi, has put a minimum requirement of 33.3% credits for courses outside the discipline in their undergraduate programs.

 Unfortunately, in single discipline institutes like engineering institutes, there are limited opportunities for creating such flexibility even in the content of education. However, the traditional approach often fails to leverage the advantages of multi-disciplinary faculty because of several inhibiting factors like (i) homogeneous educational objectives of program, (ii) over-prescribed compulsory courses in curriculum, (iii) missing or severely limited exposure to divergent disciplines, and (iv) unvarying pedagogical as well as evaluation methods.

B.     Interdisciplinarity

“Everything is connected to everything else.” – Leonardo da Vinci

Often the word interdisciplinary is interpreted in a very narrow sense of combining the knowledge of two but very similar knowledge domains. However, the curriculum must maximize the possibilities of novel forms of ‘interdisciplinary’ activities between divergent knowledge domains as well.  In 1970’s, Biglan divided the human knowledge domains along three bipolar axes – hard/soft, pure/applied, and life/non-life. Thus he created following eight categories of academic disciplines.

Biglan’s classification of discipline 

The hard-pure disciplines are concerned with universals and simplification, whereas soft-pure disciplines are concerned with particular cases. The thinking approaches significantly differ for these categories.  The hard-pure disciplines have an atomistic approach and rely more on linear logic, facts, and concepts whereas soft-pure disciplines have a holistic approach, and rely more on the breadth of intellectual ideas, creativity and expression. The hard-applied disciplines focus on problem solving and application of knowledge to create products and techniques, whereas, soft-applied disciplines focus on personal growth, reflective practice, and lifelong learning to create protocols and procedures. The hard-pure disciplines are concerned with mastery of physical environment, whereas soft-applied are concerned with enhancement of professional practice.

As per this classification, engineering disciplines belong to the octant of non-life, hard, and applied disciplines. Engineers of today must develop their ability of integrating their disciplinary knowledge of engineering with the disciplinary knowledge of any other discipline. The task of integration between those disciplines that are quite divergent from each other as per this classification is far more challenging and much more creative, as compared to the inter-disciplinary integration between closer disciplines.  I have earlier proposed following levels of interdisciplinary activities with respect to computer science:

Discipline integration sub-levels based on Biglan’s classification of disciplines

Path-breaking innovations like ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter’ are examples of interdisciplinary integration at fourth orbit. Hence, in order to prepare the students for future innovations, the curriculum must aim to expose the students to at least one area in all eight categories of disciplines as per Biglan’s classification.

C.    People differ in their Learning Styles

“Everybody’s a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it’s stupid.”- Albert Einstein

Pedagogical engagements and evaluation methods effectiveness for a student also depends a lot on his/her learning style. In 1970’s, Kolb classified the learning styles of different students into following four categories:

Kolb’s learning styles 

The traditional forms of pedagogical engagement are disadvantageous for students with divergent and accommodative learning styles. A learner-centric flexible learning environment enhances the opportunities for all students (not just few) to excel in their own well diversified ways suitable to their personal goals, learning styles, as well as intrinsic talent and interests.

D.    Flexibility in Education: An Opportunity for Engineering Universities

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”  -  Charles Darwin

Flexibility must not be misinterpreted as leniency. It is possible to offer highly flexible educational program that are also highly rigorous. Flexibility increases the macro level as well as micro level choices for the learners. It is a multidimensional concept that offers the possibilities of enhancing the diversity in the learning environment and choices of students with respect to the following dimensions:

1. Evolving Choice of educational objectives as per a student’s evolving career goals
1. Choice of Track options:

i.      Sufficient specialization in major with diversified general education,

ii.      Sufficient specialization in major, a second specialization in minor, and sufficient general education

iii.      Deep specialization in major with sufficient general education

iv.      Sufficient specialization in two majors, and limited general education

2. Continuous choice of educational content as per a student’s educational objectives
1. Choice of breadth and depth courses
2. Choice of sequence of courses
3. Choice of pace of progress
3. Diversity of educational processes to suit all learning styles and also emphasis  on the essence of engineering- the iterative process of designing, predicting performance, building, and testing
1. Diversity of pedagogical engagements
2. Diversity of evaluation methods
3. Disaster recovery through second opportunity

In India, the flexibility discourse mostly remains focused on the second aspect, i.e., educational content only. Whereas infusion of flexibility in the first and third of these aspects is equally necessary for making learner centric flexible learning environments.

Fortunately, with the introduction of MBA and various BSc, MSc, and BA programs, many engineering universities are gradually gaining the character of multidisciplinary universities with a specific focus on engineering disciplines.   Hence, we can possibly look forward to the addition of few more disciplines in near future. This trend offers the opportunity to enrich and diversify the content of our programs. However, infusing flexibility in educational objectives and processes also need adequate attention.

E.     A Proposed Framework

1.      Academic Rigour and Credits

“There is no substitute for hard work.” -  Thomas Alva Edison

Certain minimum hours are necessary (but not to be confused as sufficient) condition for deep learning. As per, European Credit System, a student should be engaged for 1500-1800 hrs. for academic work in an academic year. It includes the time spend in lectures, tutorial, seminars, laboratories, project work, assignments, literature survey, field work, and self study, etc. This translates to approx. 50 – 60 hrs. of weekly engagement in a semester system.  At good universities, 1 credit normally implies a minimum of 40 hours of total work in a semester. Consequently, it is not possible to justify more than 20-23 credits in a semester. Unfortunately many engineering universities in India offer an excessive credit load of more than 200 credits on their students. However, for most students, excessive credit load in a semester fails to stimulate and encourage deep learning in any subjects. Hence, we need to limit the overall credit requirement to not more than 160-175 credits for regular BTech program. 

The proposed reduction of credits to 160-175 credits must not be misinterpreted as reducing the academic rigour in our program. On the other hand we need to further increase the rigour in all our courses and ensure that on an average, our BTech students get a minimum of 40 hours per credit of overall engagement in a semester. The success of the proposed flexible system will primarily depend upon this precondition.

2.      Emphasis on project work and diversified evaluation methods

“The only source of knowledge is experience.” – Albert Einstein

“Learning results from what the student does and thinks and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn.” – Herbert Simon.

Fixed duration written exams are no more considered as the best evaluation methods.  Fixed duration written exams make only limited contribution for the overall development of students. Project work, laboratory work, seminar, term paper, and other form of extremely learner centric pedagogical engagements make maximum contribution to nurture students’ ability to apply the knowledge in real world, creativity, and innovation. Hence, there is a worldwide trend of introducing and emphasizing such forms of pedagogical engagements and evaluation. Hence, in our evaluation system, we should promote following distribution of engagement and evaluation in the overall educational experience of our students:

I.            45-55% share for extremely learner centric pedagogical engagements through like laboratory work, and open ended courses like project work, seminar, term paper, field work, data collection, surveys, etc.. This share can start at 20-25% in the first semester and gradually grow to 65-75% in the final semester to achieve an overall average of 45-55% share. The over breakup of this share may be as follows:

1. Around 10% credits for open ended courses like final project, minor project, POP, seminar, term paper, etc.
2. Around 15% share for laboratory component that can be offered through laboratory courses as well as integrated courses comprising of theory and laboratory both
3. 25% share for embedded open ended engagements in core and elective courses.  

II.    5-15% for attendance, tutorials, and home assignments, etc.

III.            40% for fixed duration written exams.

Such flexibility will also encourage some faculty members to engage in domain specific educational research and invent more effective educational methods.

 3.      Integrated and modular courses

Many universities follow seperate theory and lab courses.  In my view 1 credit for lab course and 4 credits for the  relevant  theory course  is highly skewed in favour of theory.  Also it is bringing an artificial separation between the theory and lab.

We should offer  integrated courses in which the theory and lab contact hours are defined in the time table but a single grade is awarded based on the comprehensive performance in all components including labs.  It means that we may offer single courses in L-T-P mode rather than two courses in L-T-0 and 0-0-P mode.   The departments should have the flexibility to assign suitable marks share for lab component  Certainly some courses may have only the theory or the lab component.

We should also allow modularization of some elective courses where different modules may be taught be different faculty members.

4.      Diversified and flexible educational objectives – Multiple track options   

As per the liberal education model and contemporary thinking in curriculum design, the students have a freedom to change their decisions regarding their major discipline during the course of their education. Some new universities in India like Ambedkar University, Delhi have started offering the option to defer the decision regarding the major choice. Apeejay Stya University, Gurgaon has also announced a similar approach.

In our system, perhaps we could consider introducing the notion of major, minor, and dual BTech and offer multiple options in the BTech program. The average work load per semester will differ for all the following four options

1. BTech (170 credits, minimum 4 years)

This is the mainstream regular track that offers sufficient specialization in majordiscipline that is fixed in first semester at the time of admission process. It offers the students to acquire a well diversified general education. This option will have the lowest work load among all the four options. A student must earn 170 credits with a minimum CGPA of 4.5 to complete this program. Out of these 170 credits at least 70 credits must be earned in the major discipline through disciplinary core, electives, and open ended courses including final year project, POP, minor projects etc.

2. BTech with additional minor (185 credits, minimum 4 years)

This can be very popular track to prepare engineers with dual specialization. Like the first track option, it will impart sufficient specialization in the major discipline. However, instead of offering well diversified general education or deep specialization in major, it will offer a minor specialization in any other discipline with sufficient general education. It will also be very useful with those students who wish to use engineering education as a springboard for diversified career pursuits.

Most real life problems of today require good understanding of more than one discipline. This track will help the students to work at the interface of two disciplines. Introduction of this flexibility will facilitate enhancement of multi and interdisciplinary activities in our campuses. For example, it may be possible for students admitted in Civil Engg. to earn their Major in Civil Engg. and Minor in Maths, Physics, IT, or even Humanities. Similarly, a CSE student could earn the minor in Maths, Physics, Civil Engg., or Humanities.

To complete this track, a student will have to take little extra work load. The student must earn additional 15 credits over and above the total credit requirement of first track. Interested departments and centers may specify a list of compulsory courses for offering minor in their disciplines. Overall a student must earn a minimum of 21 credits in minor discipline (minor core + minor electives) through extra-disciplinary university electives. In addition, the student must also complete a minimum of 3 credits of open ended courses like minor project, POP, seminar, term paper, etc in the minor discipline. The final year project of such students should preferably be in the inter-disciplinary area of their major and minor disciplines. The student must earn a minimum CGPA of 7.5 in minor discipline.

3. BTech (Hons.) (185 credits, minimum 4 years)

This provides the excellence track in the BTech program to prepare highly motivated engineers with deep specialization in major discipline. Instead of offering well diversified general education or second specialization in minor, it will offer a deep specialization in the major itself with sufficient general education. 

For earning a BTech (Hons.) in a specific discipline, a student will have to take little extra work load. The student must earn additional 15 credits over and above the total credit requirement of first track. The requirement for disciplinary core and minimum disciplinary electives for this option will be higher.  Out of a total of 185 credits, at least 93 credits must be earned in the major discipline through disciplinary core, electives, and open ended courses including final year project, POP, minor projects etc. The student must also earn a minimum CGPA of 7.5 in the major discipline.

4. Dual BTech in two disciplines of engineering (235 credits, minimum 5 years)

This is the extended form of 2^nd option. In this scheme, instead of earning minor in second engineering discipline, a highly motivated student may be allowed to simultaneously pursue dual BTech in two different discipline of engineering, e,g, BTech (CSE) and BTech (BioTech). It will offer sufficient specialization in two different disciplines of engineering with sufficient general education.  A student will be required to complete 235 credits for this option. Therefore, the average work load per semester for dual BTech students will be highest as compared to all other options.

All students are initially admitted to first option. A student may decide to take 2^nd, 3^rd, or 4^th option by the end of 3^rd semester. Seriously under-achieving students will not be permitted to take either of 2^nd, 3^rd, or 4^th options. Student may choose to withdraw from these any time during his/her program and complete it with 1^st option. Seriously under-achieving students may also be forced to do so.  

5.  Interdisciplinary curriculum through lean core and diversified electives

 The tendency to overprescribe the content of education in curriculum framework needs to be avoided by maintaining a lean and broad-based core and diversifying the knowledge categories (as per Biglan’s classification) of courses.

                            Proposed Framework for Credit Distribution

Further, in order to prepare interdisciplinary thinking in students, the faculty and departments will necessarily have to think beyond their disciplines. Often faculty members have wider interest but don’t get the opportunity to leverage such interests to offer courses outside their core disciplines. Hence, all departments should be encouraged to float some extra-disciplinary university electives beyond the conventional boundaries of their disciplines. For example, some  faculty members from various departments may like to offer university elective  course  on Sustainable Development, Human Values and Professional Ethics, Philosophy, Creativity and Innovation, Critical Thinking, Systems Thinking, Complex Engineering Systems, Epistemology, Measurement Techniques,  Design Thinking, etc.

Further, the departments (including the parent departments) may also offer some highly interdisciplinary courses that may also be considered as extra-disciplinary university electives for their own students, e.g., CSE/IT department may offer courses like Computational Finance, Sociological Computing, Digital Art, Experience Design, Computational Music, etc. Similarly, Mathematics department may offer courses like   Philosophy of Mathematics, Mathematics in Art and Architecture, Mathematical Psychology, etc.  Physics department may offer courses like Philosophy of Science, Metaphysics, Bio-physics, Physics and Instrumentation, etc. Civil Engg department may like to offer courses like History of Civil Engg., Archaeological Conservation, Global entrepreneurship in civil engineering, Managing engineering and construction processes, etc.

6.      Disaster recovery through second opportunity

Some students realize the value of hard work in some foundation courses in later semesters. However, at that time they don’t the opportunity to improve their old grades. We should permit the students to repeat up to 2 core courses. This will facilitate the students to work harder and earn a better grade in a course if they had originally earned a poor passing grade like D. Final year students with low CGPA will especially find such flexibility very useful and will be able to partially undo their past mistake at least in 1-2 very important and significant earlier courses. Similarly, we may also allow the students to take additional electives to replace up to 2 elective courses. For such repeat registrations, the new grade will replace the old grade of the concerned student.

In my opinion, we in India are at the cross roads and are bumbling along on a very uncertain and uncharted path of “education” for all, for the future in technology, and for the future builders of India.

Some how the policy makers of our country have come to the conclusion that in the field of education everything existing is bad, corrupt, and is not conducive to growth they desire. Naturally the first step is to change or “destroy” everything. Yes, in a sense revolution is one standard method of forcing things instead of them being allowed to evolve? But we are forgetting that revolutionary thinking requires a stomach to carry through the reforms ruthlessly and also have the power to do so. It is better to try an evolutionary growth rather a half-hearted revolution imposed with an apparent lack of cohesion in thinking and trying to attack the whole spectrum of education at once.

I would like the ‘educationists’ to identify the problems we are facing in the primary, the high school, the secondary school, and technology sectors and the university. In my own thinking I would like to mention some of the problems that are choking the system. The observations are not unique but I have attempted to highlight the bewildering feeling of a sordid chaos at all levels. Let us start with the university and let me add “Why can’t we leave the administration and academics of Universities to Academicians?”

A. University

The problems the Universities are facing are described below:

• Lack or very meagre amount of Funds.

• Interference by the state and by the private promoters, politicians and bureaucrats as well

• Toothless administration by the University Grants Commission. The UGC are totally undesirable and should be done away with. The colonial powers may have decided to exercise control over what is taught in the universities but in the independent India should not the universities be free to teach what they like and how they do so. What positions, age, qualifications and salaries they have for their staff should not be the concern of the UGC. The immediate question raised is what happens to the ‘standard’ of education.

• Shall the standard not be market driven; if the students find the degree valueless the University would be closed down? A check on the standard of education imparted is discussed in later paragraphs.

• Universities should charge heavy fees so that they can sustain themselves financially. Loans from the Banks, partial fees waivers for the deserving students would make students in India pay for their education as against the present practice of parents bearing the whole cost.

• Emphasis should shift to Post Graduate and Research. Business and Industry have to finance research in the Universities and I can see the role of the government would be to make research funding by industries compulsory.

• Our total thinking is veering towards funding for Technical education only but we are forgetting that Social Science make a far larger impact on the society. Even today, engineering has only 10% students. 40 to 50 % students study so called Arts, 20% study Science and the balance around 20% study Commerce and Management.  It is the quality of social science and humanities education rather than the quantity that is the main concern.
• Somehow with our colonial past we have been downgrading educational efforts in Social Sciences. If we look at it dispassionately we would find that our efforts in Technical education have made us totally subservient to USA and European powers. Even the great money earner of IT industry derives it sustenance from them. The technologies that we acquired form abroad could not be duplicated in numbers and we are importing improved versions again and again from the same sources.

• The standards in UG and PG classes of most of the universities have fallen so much that not much value is placed on them – a pity. We have seen that in some universities classes hardly are held in Law courses and Masters programme in Commerce. Not many efforts are being made to modernise their syllabi and curricula and make the education more intensive so that a student in these courses spends as much time studying at home as in the engineering classes.

• Shortage of faculty to teach is another aspect of poor quality of education imparted in our universities. No doubt one-to-many with eye contact of the teacher with the students in a small size class [say around 40] is the most effective and suitable mode of teaching. Since the availability of good faculty is becoming difficult the universities have to adopt well known ‘large class’ techniques where a competent and well qualified faculty member engages the lecture. This is backed by intensive tutorials and use of digital technology.
• If we do not trust our universities to check and correct their own standards it is futile to expect a visiting committee to find all the faults and non-compliance of the rules and regulations. Normally the universities have Faculties of Science, Social Science, Arts, Commerce, Languages etc and the task of maintaining standards should be of the Faculty. They may form a three member Internal committee that will look into details of the working of that Faculty. Issues like number of days of instruction, attendance of the students, level of question papers set, desired coverage of the subject, level of gradation and award of grades, student feedback  etc may be under their scrutiny. A peer evaluation hopefully would lead a better check on the standards.
• Universities could also offer degrees in Engineering and Medicine if they fulfil the conditions required. The case of Engineering education is discussed in a subsequent article.
• Permission to open a university (including Colleges discussed below) either by the government, private trusts, or other organisations could be given by the State / Central government through an Act passed by the legislature. However I would suggest that a University could be opened by any individual or group subject to a broad guideline approved for all such ventures. The idea is that quality of education should be a measure of the success of a university. Placements would be automatic if the quality of education is good. Post-establishment of the university there will be no bureaucratic ‘look into’ its functioning.

Far reaching suggestions have been made by the high power Prof Yashpal Committee appointed by the government to suggest reforms in the education system at the university level. Particularly they cortically reviewed the functioning of UGC and AICTE among other things. Some of the suggestions made by the members of the committee are very welcome but some are only purely rhetorical and risky. Since UGC, for example, is not working as desired it should be disbanded and replaced by a ‘Supremely Powerful Central Committee who would regulate and look after everything. They would appoint Vice-Chancellors to all universities – as if that gentleman selected by this august body would solve all the difficulties of the university. This committee consisting of Noble Laureates and eminent scientists sitting in Delhi would provide instant solutions to the university problems. Was it Don Quixote that comes to mind?

The bureaucrats, industrial leaders, Ministers, and what-have-you in public “blame” the defenceless universities that they are not doing research. Unfortunately nobody turns around and asks ‘hey this is the amount of money the society has given you for research and you have wasted it and done nothing much”. And then we wake up and see that Harvard, Yale, Berkeley et al are doing so well but why not our local Harvards. Have they bothered to find out the total budget of these universities and their per student expenditure? Their research budget, their Alumni funding and Industrial projects funding would take care of the needs of some states in India. Put gas in the machine before you expect it to run and perform. Find funds and more importantly find how to get funds for the universities and then put them in the dock for non-performance..

B. Colleges

We are discussing non-engineering and non-technical colleges mostly affiliated to a university that actually award the degrees. Unfortunately these institutions are totally tied up with the other colleges of the affiliating university. They have no freedom to decide their curricula and syllabi, their exams are conducted by the university and the evaluation is also done by them. This is a great hindrance and stumbling bock in developing creativity, innovativeness and diversity in education and ideas. The suggestion of the Committee that 1500 colleges that are doing well be made into Universities is a very welcome move.  If a particular college has the facilities and is doing well I see no objection to this college being made independent and permitted to have its own syllabi and curricula and award degree. They have to make all efforts to maintain their standards and if they fail to live up to their reputation the student registration will drop and they will end up losing their independence. Suggestion of a SAT type universal test is good and desirable and along with a recommendation from the teachers from the school could be used as the yardstick for admission.

Other than the student reactions and feedback, the college performance has to be reviewed and evaluated every three years. These colleges should be allowed to offer Honours degrees that are research driven degrees with emphasis on liberal education and academic excellence. Subjects belonging to a wide range of subjects of Social Sciences, Sciences, Commerce, Law and Languages etc could be offered by them. In some subjects where facilities exist, these colleges could operate at the PG and PhD level like any university. Admission to the ‘regular’ university entrusted with major research efforts would be open to the students passing out of these ‘college-universities’. I have a different suggestion, different from the Committee, for Colleges that do not make into the above category. They may be allowed to offer only UG degrees designated as a Pass degree with an emphasis on a broad level of liberal education. Since vocational and technical studies have not been given the importance that is required these Pass courses may have vocational studies as one important component. The range of subjects on offer may be extensive with a technical flavour as suggested. Students passing out of these colleges would normally not be eligible for pursuing Postgraduate degrees. However, if the student so desires and his performance is excellent, he may be allowed to join the third year of the Honours programme and get into the PG stream. in effect these colleges may be encouraged to offer Vocational and ‘Technology’ oriented programmes with various combinations of any three subjects like; English, Economics, History, Geography, Philosophy, Psychology, Computer Science, Information Technology, Mechanical Sciences, Health care, Electrical Sciences, Environment, Arts, Hindi, Urdu, Regional Languages, Banking, Agricultural Finance, Agricultural Marketing and a large number of subjects from various disciplines.

We would be looking at the functioning of these colleges to produce educated middle level workers connected with various economic activities of the society but with some technology orientation mainly brought through Computer Science, Information Technology, Mechanical and Electrical Sciences and Banking etc.  

We shall discuss the issues related to Engineering and Technology in a separate article.

Cross-level Peer Mentoring

Mentoring has been defined as a process for the informal transmission of knowledge, social capital, and psychosocial support perceived by the recipient as relevant to work, career, or professional development; mentoring entails informal communication, usually face-to-face and during a sustained period of time, between a person who is perceived to have greater relevant knowledge, wisdom, or experience (the mentor) and a person who is perceived to have less (the protégé) [1].

Organizations use it for widening of skills base and competencies in line with their strategic goals, and find it a cost effective form of personal development. It also improves teamwork and cooperation in organizations. Mentees get benefitted by mentor’s support in many ways: analysis and reflection, problem solving, self-confidence and ability to take risks, acceptance of criticism, as well as broadened horizons and maturity.

Over the last few years, I have been documenting the experiences and views of professionals as well as students about mentoring.  Excerpts of few responses of some software professionals are given below.

1. …it was the best two years of my time at IBM. Every day I went to work and came home with a smile on my face …
2. I learned how valuable diversity was to the success …
3. we get multiple perceptions…
4. Are you able to explain which is the best idea? and which is not? Can you explain concepts that initially are beyond the other person? These are crucial skills and mentoring helps to develop and sharpen them.
5. …keep on learning by inventing new ideas… .
6. I learnt more about myself, decision making process, individual differences, and of course communication skills…
7. my learning grows exponentially by coaching or guiding someone
8. great sense of satisfaction … fresh perspective to your own outlook … learn how to manage interactions and figure out how to deal with people
9. “Help” is a fundamental button for homo-sapiens …
10. I found that I was required to look within myself and develop patience and empathy…
11. it forces us to think about things critically so that we can explain it to someone else. I have found personally that mentoring forces me to grow, and usually benefits me more intellectually than the recipient.

At JIIT, since 2005, we have been engaging senior student to mentor the laboratory work and projects of junior students. So far more than 1,000 senior students have contributed to the learning of their juniors. Off course some have taken the task much more enthusiastically as comapared to many others.    Here are the excerpts of the benefits as reported by some  alumni and final year students who had mentored (or were mentoring)  the labs/project of their  juniors in a faculty guided structured format  at JIIT during 2005-2011.

1. Questions thrown up by the mentee sometimes made me look deeper for some concepts to which I had never paid much attention earlier …/… one is able to find out gaps in knowledge and determine understanding of the subject …/I was able to better revise my subjects …/… It gave me the chance to continuously improve myself …/ Things which I thought I understood were actually understood while I was making someone else understand.…It helps the mentor grow in almost every dimension …subject matter is strengthened and he gains clarity …one gets to hear his own thoughts/good revision of all fundamentals and some good genuine doubts solutions/ learning some new technologies/ keeps me update/I am strengthening my concepts of programming/ helpful to me for some higher examinations/deeper understanding/ boosts my confidence and helps me in the process of self-learning.
2. … I had to explain them in a simple manner…/communicate effectively, use and upgrade his own skills/… improved my ability to present the same topic from different angles …/I also noticed a change in the way I started explaining things to other people …/ Having to explain one’s thinking to someone else seems to help get it straight in one’s own mind …/ I was able to communicate much better to different people and could express my ideas in a more effective manner/ Properly defining problem/Patience and listening/ communication skill in explaining ourselves to others/ I am much more expressive now and can explain and present things better/… think more and think in line with the people working with me and in my surroundings/ be more receptive to the problems of others.
3. … best thing I learnt was to look at the other side of the coin …/…ability to move from macro to micro details and vice versa, patience and openness to critically analyze alternative approaches…/… I realized that every problem could be solved through different techniques … Mentoring helps thinking out of the box … the joy you get when they come out with flying colors is incomparable/ … It’s one of the best ways to discover ourselves and our creativity/… my confidence increased as I matured with classes, my tolerance increased …  my ability to think out of the box and also trying to think more than students and also commenting on their performance increased my critical analysis ability…/how to approach towards a given problem/ … into every problems in different ways and helps us to find various solutions/It helps me to understand how a problem is perceived differently by different people and hence helps me to understand the common error which a coder can do and in future I’ll try to remove those technical snags which usually don’t come to mind.
4. Makes you feel like a bigger person. Makes you believe in yourself more when others believe in you … /… instilled a sense of an extra added responsibility…/ Mentoring provide inner satisfaction. … makes you a better person …you have to critically analyze the drawbacks and tradeoffs and justify your advisee, which makes things clearer to you …you learn how to read and understand someone else’s code … more responsible, more disciplined… It motivates you to become better at your own work /You tend to bring out the best in you/ It helped me shape my personality and enhanced my leadership and interpersonal skills. … my tolerance and patience had surely increased …/Self-confidence level increased …got to know varied and completely out of the box concepts … patience level increased. I had to give a logical explanation as to why this idea will/will not work… understood that teaching is not an easy job…/… deal with my subordinates/ built my leadership quality a lot/ quality of working as a team leader and resolving the problems faced by the people/inculcating qualities of a project manager/ Improved leadership skills, multiple perspectives/ I am gaining on mentoring skills and ways to communicate a problem to different people. …it is helping me understand the mind of different coders/ understand the responsibilities and duties of being a supervisor/ give my hundred percent knowledge and also act like a team leader/ I can now understand the problems which a new comer faces/ Building rapport with different kinds of students, understanding others; code, taking responsibility.
5. The decision making and project management skills that got polished during the mentoring really helped me in long term/…working with unknown person or a team/Working in such large team and coordinating with multiple project …
6. software quality and testing concepts along with designing/ I have clarified my concepts on requirement engineering which has helped me in my final year project report.
7. … unique addition to my ability/ Broadened our mental skills.
8. Enhancing my teaching skills/ I have found a teacher inside me/ I want to become a lecturer so it’s helping me understand the student mind/ would definitely aid me in applying for teaching assistantship.

I invite the larger professional community to post comments and share their own experiences either as mentee or as mentor.  While  sharing your experiences as mentees, you may also like to use this opportunity to publicly acknowledge your mentor(s) for contributing to your intellectual and professional growth.

References:

1.  B. Bozeman and M.K. Feeney, Toward a useful theory of mentoring: A conceptual analysis and critique. Administrative and Society 39 (6),  pp 719–739, October 2007

The lament that the IITs, IIMs and the Universities are not world class is not justified when one measures the low output, of at least the five original IITs, in terms of Research and Development over the past six decades or so. I joined IIT Kharagpur in 1952 as a student when that first IIT was only one year old and was functioning from an abandoned jail building. The WWII had ended a few years back and even the mighty American Universities and Colleges did not have much of engineering research. The “enforced” advances and developments in engineering, manufacturing and production made during the war were ready for use for general industrial growth The Industries were also driving them hard to try and catch up with the Europeans especially the Germans. The desire of the American leaders and people to dominate the world in engineering and technology gave a fillip to the industries to support indigenous research and the fruits of that were lapped up by them.

Around the same time India became independent and looking around our political leadership found that the country needs ‘world class’ engineering colleges to produce Engineers that would drive the country forward. The British at the end of WWII thought that their prized possession India should be given some “inaam” for the sacrifices of the Indian soldiers who fought gallantly along with the ‘gora’ army. They suggested the establishment of four Government Engineering Colleges in the four corners of the country. The central universities Calcutta, Bombay, Banaras Hindu University, Aligarh Muslim University, Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, and Madras universities were there for the Scientific research and had an engineering college attached to them.  The Arts faculties were thriving in these places though Tagore also was encouraged to establish Shantiniketan. They were not planning to establish Oxford or Cambridge here despite the two Nobel Laureates,  both from Calcutta.

Our Government took out the British time Sarkar Committee report eaten by moth balls and established four and on demand five Engineering colleges called by the pompous name of Indian Institute of Technology. The world organisations and powers like UNO, Russia, USA, Germany and UK came forward in that order to help in establishing these five dream colleges. There was no emphasis on research and all the effort was to teach things that would be useful to the industries. In the initial stages teachers were recruited from the industries and there were practically no Doctorates in engineering departments at Kharagpur. We had Professors from UK, Germany, Russia, France and USA in engineering departments but all the research was confined to the Science Departments. Things started changing from 1964 onwards when the first Indian PhD in Civil Engineering was awarded by IIT Kharagpur.

It is possibly forgotten that in the decades of 1960-80 there was no Internet, no Xeroxing facility and only a very cumbersome cyclostyling facility was available in offices. Very few journals existed and even in IITs there was no funding for research by the Government till 1970-1 when the first good research grant was given by the Ministry of Defense to all the five IITs . The IITs and the government expected that the IITs would produce B Tech graduates comparable to the best in the world and everybody was proud of our product all around. From personal experience I can say that whenever we reviewed our performance the benchmark was acceptance by “our industries” – a fiction no doubt. Our students were highly successful in research and development orqanisations world over, something that made all of us Indians happy. We were blamed off and on for “brain drain” and that we were producing graduates that did extremely well in the USA and UK. Teaching and curricula had to suit the requirements of the Indian industries there. Despite all of this the faculty at the IITs did commendable research and we did exceedingly well there. In certain areas the publications in esteemed foreign journals from the IITs was higher than those produced by MIT, UCLA and Stanford. The Indian industry by and large was NOT interested in these research outcomes.

If the requirement was research then we did a colossal blunder in concentrating on Under Graduate education  and that is persisting even today. The industry said we are good and the measure used for judging was “placement”.  Do we serve the industry or do some “not wanted” research. Our industry-controlled and run for the profit motif is full of “so called” industrialists who buy CKD and SKD goods from abroad and sell it in India. Where were the famous “industrialists” who are interested in any technical development? Research had become purely abstract like in science research and no industry was wanting it or bothered about it and actually had any use for it. It is easier to import the product and sell it rather spend money on developing it where the success rate of 10 percent return on investment is extremely good. Even if we take mass produced and consumed items like cell phone, fridge, refrigerators television sets, computers, laptops etc. we find that they are all foreign make. It appears that we have taken a vow and resolved that we will never produce mass consumption items like the ones cited above in our country. Naturally there is no need to do any research in items where major profits are made by Europeans, Americans, Koreans, Japanese, and lately Chinese. Maybe the Swiss Bank odyssey of our people is kept alive by such policies.

Till we come to the late nineties and early twenties. Profit motif at all costs finally hit like Tsunami when people of Murthy guild built empires on “false” premises. Did Indian Science and Technology become subservient to the interests of American Industry? All of us lauded their great achievements of Infosys, WIPRO, TCS like empires. Yes we should be proud of serving the Masters, making money, giving jobs, do Technical “thekedari” and strut around. Yes we were happy with the second hand development – Tatas possibly are the only exception. Defense and Space had no way out but to “indulge” in research but even then happily import the series of Fighters MIG 17, MIG 21, MIG 23, MIG 27 and Sukhois every time with a fresh contract of developing them indigenously. Wonderful. After getting, say, MIG 21 did we put 5000 engineers and scientists to develop, copy, modify and have our own 1000 MIG 21**s. we could have had a MIG 35 (India design) selling in the market. And why not. BUT who wanted it? The money our babus, officers and politicians make and stash in Swiss banks in making the deals much more profitable than the pride of Indian science and technology. AND now that an IITan by fact and by heart admits that IITs went wrong somewhere along the line everybody is jumping around. What hypocrisies.

AND now suddenly we discover that we are nowhere in the Industrial development scene in the world and that IITs should have been doing industrial R &D but pray for whom. This Indian nation governed by a corruption ridden social strata of society is looking for reasons of non-performance in the field of Industrial research and development comparable to the best of USA. Let us not forget that even they are not very old in this field. Given a chance and opportunity Indian scientists and engineers have done exceedingly well. Jairam Ramesh is bothered about it but our bosses are sanguine. The writing was on the wall but then we were all singing Hosanna to Murthy and party and we did not look up and see the world go by in applied engineering research. Our boys at a pittance of salary and allowance, solved the problems of USA and it was wonderful for the Indian powers that be that it solved the problems of job creation at a large scale.

The question is what steps have the government taken to improve the population of Masters and Doctorate degree programmes and re-orient at least the IITs to do more research. Unfortunately the question still remains, for whom. I hope it is understood that large number of B Tech would never take us forward in R & D.  We were busy getting our children admissions in IIT failing that in other look- alike and sending them abroad later if possible.  More than one hundred thousand students go abroad for education and not brain drain. ‘Satyanas’ of education was written when “Coaching” stopped all creativity avenues for a 14 year old Indian. His Nose to the grind of 4 hours coaching over and above the school hours and learning by mugging has taken away fun from school. His total focus is in getting admission into IIT or a good Medical College – failing that in a good engineering college. Again despite this urge the ordinary Indian family dreams of Indian Administrative Service because of “power”, money and prestige it gives to a society accustomed to a “ruler”. Professionals, Industrialists and Politicians take a back seat in our society compared to an IAS officer compared to other advanced countries.

Let us see what could have been done or done even now – usual after the horse has bolted. Late Arjun Singh thought that IITs are the future and created eight more of them. If we want quality – why it is easy — go and get American universities to come here and make all of us brilliant and on the forefront of research and knowledge. WHAT FUN? The other “Indians” are bread to be technical “”Coolies” for the white masters. CHANGE the IIT system at least if required.

An out of the box suggestion for making major changes in the IIT system is as follows.

1. We change our system and make IITs to offer a 5 year M Tech (no B Tech) and an option of 7 year PhD programme for students who qualify in JEE. It should be attractive enough to get the best into it by offering good scholarships and freeships. If a student chooses the 7 year programme his entire 7 years should be tuition free plus a good fellowship. The IITs do not offer a B Tech programme but other colleges are free to do so. They could offer a five year M Tech plus PhD programme after the B Tech with attractive fellowships and freeships.
2. Good number students getting in this IIT system should be given free tuition for all the seven years. Scholarship / fellowships of say 25,000 rupees or better to start with. (Medical education in USA follows this pattern) .
3. Teachers in the IITs should have no fixed pay scale. Salaries to depend on his total commitment to research, publications, teaching ability, projects handled and consultancy. Such a Professor is treated as an asset.
4. All industries are forced by legislation to spend 2 percent of their profit on relevant R and D.  Tax relief be built in the legislation. They be asked to fund for research in R & D areas of their activities.
5. Like most of the countries that have a ‘certification for engineers’ we should have a compulsory legislation for certification of our B Tech qualified engineers. M Tech may be exempt.

In India the BIG question remains – research for what. “research kar darya mein daal”. Publication should not be end of research but rather a bye-product. It should lead to something worthwhile. Recently I came across a marvel created by Chinese railway engineers when they connected Tibet with the main land by rail, totally indigenous and considered impossible. This was a total Chinese ingenuity and design since nobody had done something like it elsewhere.

Related Articles:

Do Top Indian Institutes Have World Class Faculty?

Let us contrast this with Indian situation.    At IITs, overall acceptance rate (including latest IITs) is around 1% .   NITs and IIITs also have a similar acceptance rate.  Even after scoring 95% marks in school board, kids are not sure to  get their preferred college that  admit the students  based on their board performance.   What kind of options does some kid  with AIEEE rank of 84,oo0 (top 6% in approx. 14 lakh applicants) have?

It is most unfortunate that good quality college education is having such huge demand-supply gap in India.  The supply of high quality higher education has to be increased immediately.   A country of 120 crore people can certainly do it provided its leadership shows the determination.   So far the academic, business, and political leadership is failing to address the problem. This is  why the foreign universities  want to encash on the opportunity.   Obviously  we  need to wake up and do something drastically different.   Incremental changes won’t help.   

Do we care?

Engaged students in SERO style lecture session

In late 90′s, in  a one to one conversation wrt a project, Prof. BN Sarasawati,  at IGNCA, made a very powerful  statement, ”questions are more important than answers.”    This was my one of the best lessons learnt at IGNCA.   We learn when we engage ourselves in finding answers to some questions.  Successful inquiry of  difficult questions creates deeper learning. Deep learning occurs when we also learn to raise new questions.  Feeling of cognitive dissonance [1] [2] [3] [4] is a necessary precondition for learning.

Engaging students in inquiry is one of core principles of my proposed framework for designing pedagogical engagements [5].   In this article, I discuss how lectures can be used to engage students in small inquiries to (re)discover knowledge for themselves individually and collectively rather than receive it as well formulated constructs from teachers.

The discourse in the lecture classroom can be viewed as a story telling artifact. The objective of this artifact is to create a meaningful learning experience and knowledge structures for every learner. The discourse in a large number of lectures is designed as a closed artifact that primarily sees the students as consumers. A fundamental challenge for designers in the new millennium is to design open systems and artifacts by inventing and designing a culture in which humans can express themselves and engage in personally meaningful activities [6]. Open systems and artifacts must evolve, they cannot be completely designed prior to use. They must evolve at the hands of the users, and they must be designed for evolution. The dichotomy of designer and user has to be eschewed. Seeding, Evolutionary growth, and Reseeding (SER) has been proposed as a conceptual framework for designing sustainable, open, and evolutionary systems [7] [8].

A seed is the initial state of a system that is intended to evolve.  The evolutionary growth phase is one of unplanned evolution as the seed is used by the members of a community to do work. Reseeding is a deliberate effort to organize, formalize, and generalize knowledge created during the evolutionary growth phase. Courses as seeds have been proposed as a promising model to evolve and enrich courses by allowing students to act as active contributors, and not just as passive consumers [9].

The genesis of any story experience is Emotional Movement [10]. Users crave emotional engagement and stimulation.  Situated inside the context of lecture classroom, every learner (user) is the author of his own personal meaning.  Meaning is the product of interaction between the observer and the system, the content of which is in a state of flux, of endless change and transformation [11]. In Poetics, Aristotle suggested that a well constructed plot must be a whole having beginning, middle, and end [12]. Movement Oriented Design (MOD) views a story as an ensemble of ‘story units’ in which a ‘story unit’ has three parts, the Begin, Middle, and the End (BME) [13]. Begin lays the groundwork, hooks the user, imploring to find out more. Middle carries the main story message, conveys the core meaning.  End terminates the story, concludes the current story, and/or links to the next.

As per the SERO model, every lecture is delivered as a series of SER blocks, and concluded with a learning Outcome. Seed is the fresh idea or question from a teacher which is generally not an obvious derivative of an earlier idea. Evolution has been used to label the active learning phase in the class involving individual thinking, group work, discussions (among student groups of varying size, and also between the students and teacher), and solving problems that require thinking in terms of  analysis, synthesis, and/or evaluation.  Reseed is being used to label the phase of formalizing the informal ideas generated during the evolution stage, and deriving another seed as a derivative of this evolution.

Students usually have greater motivation to learn in the context of solving a problem, than if the content is delivered out of context [14]. The seeding phase in SERO based lectures offers good opportunity to create context.  Situated in this context, the content is developed during the evolution phase through problem solving activities.

The teacher makes a deliberate attempt not to deliver generalized content without the context or before problem solving. Instead, the generalisations are presented as a natural fallout of the theorising process through solution-unification during the reseeding phase to conclude the evolution phase. In this model, the teacher has to support the students during evolution phase individually or in smaller groups and only some time the entire class.

The teacher needs to be the centre of attention of the entire class only during the limited period of seed and reseed stages, and occasionally during the evolution stage, as and when the need arises. Sometimes the evolution phase may also become teacher-centric, as the teacher may occasionally decide to demonstrate the problem solving process with some specific case(s), rather than engaging the students in problem solving because of the lack of sufficient background with the students or time constraints. However, the problem solving characteristic of the evolution phase remains unchanged. At the end, the learning outcomes are summarized and an assignment is announced. This assignment forms the reseed for the next class.

Usually there are not many seeds in a lecture, only reseeds. Most of the time is used in evolution and active learning. This model has been tried out successfully in many courses, even with a large number of students.  The attached pictures of one such class during the evolutionary growth of a concept through group exercise.  Given below are summaries of the proceedings of one  such lecture class  of computer graphics  in 2004 at JIIT.

Summary of SERO lecture in a Computer Graphics course (2004)  

1.  Seed 1.1.1:  CG has picture description as input and picture as output.

2.   Seed 1.1.2:  Required inputs = fn (desired output).

3.   Evolution 1.1: Output picture taxonomy for CG

                      static vs dynamic picture (degree of dynamism)

                      colour vs B&W (colouredness in the whole spectrum from binary to true color)

                       interactive vs non-interactive (degree of interactivity)

                       realistic vs symbolic (degree of realism)

                       objects vs abstract (degree of abstraction)

                        geometric objects vs natural objects

4.   Reseed 1.1 (Homework): Refine the taxonomy.

5.   Seed 1.2: Demonstration of a simple working graphics program and its code, with a focus on initialisation and closing of graphics mode, and some introduction to other functions.

6.   Reseed 1.2(Homework): Practice using the graphics library.

7.    Reseed 1.3: Identify some static and b&w picture and describe it in a machine readable format.

8.     Evolution 1.2: Get your description critiqued by your partner, and rewrite your description.

9.     Reseed 1.4: Develop a description scheme for encoding a description of a tree in machine readable format  in a text file.

10. Evolution 1.3: Three solutions proposed by students:

(i)      Row major 1/0  (ii) List of points for which colour is 1. (assumption: all others are 0)

(ii)     Vectorised information

11.Reseed 1.5 (HW):  Develop a description scheme for encoding a tree description in machine readable format in a text file. Create this file. Write a program to read this file, and create a tree on the screen.

12. Evolution 1.4 (HW):  Design and programming work over the week involving 2 hrs. of batch-wise practical session with  laboratory instructors in batches of 30 students, and group-wise discussions with the teacher with some groups on their initiative.

Learning Outcome #1: Students got an insight into the working of a simple graphics program already created by one of their peer student. They also succeeded in conceiving and evolving the taxonomy of graphics and data structures for static graphics.  

Experience

SERO style lecture classes were found to be highly engaging and useful by motivated undergraduate students. However, many other students, who were mainly motivated by examination oriented study, did not find these classes very useful for them.

Challenges for Inquiry Teaching in Software Development Education

The success of Inquiry Teaching mainly depends upon students’ active participation in the inquiry process. It requires, and also furthers, the transformation of students’ perception about their own role in the process of learning from an information receiver to an active contributor to meaning making. However, for many students, their old habits formed through prior experiences with exposition based teaching, can hinder their enthusiastic participation as an active learner in the classroom, especially in large and unresponsive classes. Such students find inquiry teaching to be unsatisfactory, and miss the opportunity of not only deep but also surface learning.  Therefore, it is most important to sensitize students to this method of learning in their early courses. For maximizing the benefits of inquiry teaching, students need to ‘learn to learn’ through this method.

Including puzzle solving in first computing course has been found to be very useful for nurturing the habit of inquiry learning in computing students [15].

 References:

[1]   Two Core Principles about Learning

[2]   Phenomenon of Learning – A Unified Explanatory Theory

[3]   Great Gurus’ Wisdom – What Socrates, Galileo, and Einstein said about teaching?

[4]  100+ anecdotes of Most effective Lecture classes as recalled and narrated by Computing students

[5]  Design of Interventions for Instructional Reform in Software Development Education for Competency Enhancement

[6] Arias, E.G., Eden, H., Fischer, G., & Schraff, E. “Transcending the Individual Human Mind – Creating Shared Understanding through Collaborative Design”, ACM Transactions on Computer Human-Interaction, 7(1), pp. 84-113, March 2000.

[7] Fischer, Gerhard, Meta-design: Beyond User Centered and Participatory Design, Proceedings of HCI International, Crete, Greece., 22-27 June, 2003.  

[8] Fischer, G., Seeding, Evolutionary Growth and Reseeding: Constructing, Capturing and Evolving Knowledge in Domain-Oriented Design Environments, Journal of Automated Software Engineering, Springer Netherlands, pp 447 – 464, October 1998.

[9]  Fischer, G. dePaula, R., Ostwald, J., “Courses as Seeds: Expectations and Realities”, Proceedings of The European Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (Euro-CSCL 2001), Maastricht, The Netherlands, March 22-24, pp 494-501, 2001. [http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/ecscl2001.pdf.

[10] Sharda, Nalin, Combining the Art, Science and Technology of Multimedia with The Multimedia Creation Circles Paradigm, Preprint, 2004, http://sci.vu.edu.au/~nalin/MultimediaCreationCirclesPreprintSharda.pdf.

[11] Ascott, R., Is there Love in the Telematic Embrace? Art Journal:  New York:  College Arts Association of America. 49:3, pp. 241-7, 1990, retrieved from http://x.i-dat.org/~mp/DIGF/LM/PDF/TelematicEmbrace.pdf.

[12] Aristotle, “Poetics”, 350 BC.

[13] Sharda, Nalin, Combining the Art, Science and Technology of Multimedia with The Multimedia Creation Circles Paradigm, Preprint, http://sci.vu.edu.au/~nalin/MultimediaCreationCirclesPreprintSharda.pdf, 2004.

[14] Miliszewska Iwona et al, “Transnational Education through Engagement: Students’ Perspective”, Informing Science, pp 165-173, June 2003.

[15]  Engaging Students in Puzzle Solving for Developing their Logical Problem Solving ability

_________________________________________

Multimedia involves the art and technology for designing the information and experiences to inform and engage people. It also affords to overcome the traditional communication barriers of space and time.

In software industry, the importance of multimedia and human computer interaction has significantly increased in the last decade. In some fields like animation, games, educational software, it is even more important.  It requires a cross cultural interaction of graphic designers and software engineers.  Hence, a basic understanding of aesthetics and graphic design tools becomes very useful for engineers to help them make a good team with graphic designers.  Taking this trend into consideration, in 2002, JIIT, Noida, initiated the teaching of multimedia courses. Our earlier design and development experience in several pioneering multimedia projects at the Cultural Informatics Lab of IGNCA provided us the necessary background and insights to design and further evolve these courses.

We began with a basic course in ‘Graphics and Presentations Design,’ which gradually grew and now, we offer three courses in this stream for B.Tech Students. These courses expose students to area of Graphics Design, 2D and 3D Animation Design, and theories of Multimedia Communication and Interaction Design. With respect to these courses, while the second author’s role is mostly limited to planning activities only, the first author has been regularly involved in directly teaching and coordinating these courses. Several other faculty members were also inducted for teaching of the first of these  to a very large number of students.  Few faculty members, e.g., Anuja Arora, Ritu Arora, and Suma Dawn have been enthusiastic members of this teaching team on many occasions. Few others have also contributed.

For undergraduate students, these three aesthetic multimedia oriented courses compliment our department’s computational multimedia courses like  Computer Graphics, Image Processing, and Multimedia Computing.  These computational courses focus on algorithmic, mathematical, scientific, programming, and technological aspects of multimedia technology.  A prior exposure to our aesthetic multimedia courses enhances the level of these computational courses as well because the students have already used some powerful multimedia tool. While  few motivated students develop the urge to develop some such tools, almost all become  better prepared to understand the technolgy behind  such tools.

Multimedia Development Lab I

The very first course “Multimedia Development Lab I (MMDEV I)” offered to 2^nd year B.Tech. (CSE/IT/ECE) students, is a lab course. It introduces students to the world of digital graphics and interface design. Through this course, the students start appreciating the considerations behind good user interface designs. They develop hands-on skills with different types of graphic design tools.  The students are also exposed to some professional working styles and sub-processes by means of a mini project.

A variety of projects have been executed by the students in this course. In the year 2002, they designed the cover pages of several magazines. In 2003, they designed a variety of print material like cover pages of several magazines, brochures, news paper layouts, product promotional pamphlets & danglers, etc. In 2004, we moved towards creating a wide range of advertising material.  In 2005, the next batches worked on designing of numerous publishing materials like calendars, CD covers, hoardings, brochures, posters, website layouts etc. In 2006, the students were asked to create significant key frames of small stories and poems and these pages were linked in sequence to run as Slide shows.  In the year 2007, a huge mass of 608 students were assigned a single educational multimedia project based on NCERT middle school syllabus, with specified individual work division to avoid any copying in the project work. In 2008, around 300 students learned to design various types of publishing material like brochures, proceedings, cover page, and CD covers for international conferences. In 2009, they created a series of posters on biographies of famous people in the world, and in 2010, they worked on creation of a series of posters on history of science and technology. Currently in 2011, they are creating 300 posters to various topics of history, art and science.

Student Creations

In this course, students are given weekly Lab and take home assignments based on Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator. Lab assignments are evaluated there and then, and ‘take home assignments’ are evaluated in the next class. Every work is judged on the basis of accuracy, neatness, and aesthetics. Each lab assignment has a specific aim for which the student has to use a number of techniques.   A few typical examples of assignments include extracting an image from its background, merging multiple images to create a new image, color & tonal adjustment, colorizing textured grayscale images, and restore old & torn photographs, use of filters, effects & brushes, creation of visual layouts & illustrations, image slicing and linking etc. The students also practice automation techniques, e.g., action, batch processing, photomerge, create droplet, fit image, crop and straighten photos, lens correction etc. Many a times, the assignments are to be performed on students’ self & their family photos.

Though this course is assigned only one credit in the curriculum, the assignments require a significant amount of homework. As per their feedback, 70-80% of students like it.

This course has very large number of students and in addition to the first author, 2-5 other faculty members are engaged to take lab classes for different groups in the batches of 30 students.  As there is no common lecture class assigned to this course, it is often felt that not all students get the conceptual clarity and guidance with respect to aesthetics and balance in graphic design.  In order to address this matter, we now plan to create video lectures on these issues. We also plan to create an archive of video recordings of selected project meetings.

Multimedia Development Lab II

The second lab course “Multimedia Development Lab II” is offered to 3rd yr B.Tech. (IT) students. It is designed to enable students to practice various creative as well as technical sub-processes in animation production and impart skills to handle 2D & 3D animation tools like Adobe Image Ready, Flash, and  3D Studio Max. Till 2009 Animo (Cambridge Animation System) was also used in this course. The course is delivered through practical exercises oriented towards imparting basic skills of concept development and tool handling during pre-production and production phases of animation production. Regular lab and take-home assignments are given to students.

To bring conceptual clarity, we start with creation of story line and story boards as per our format.  We have designed different formats for non-interactive and interactive projects. The students then get acquainted with animation tools. Sometimes, the students are provided with a sample animation, which they have to re-create by the end of lab.  Sometimes, they are provided with an outline of story of an animation sequence which they themselves have to further visualize and create. They practice various types of animation techniques using Flash, e.g., cel animation, tweening, guided motion, onion skinning, movie clips, edit centre, morphing, object animation, compiled animation etc.   Further, they integrate the animations with html code, audio and video. Action scripts are created for giving interactivity. 3DS Max is used for 3D object modeling and modifying, cloning, applying materials, texture mapping, lights and camera movement, animation trajectories, particle system, morphing, space warps, human body kinematics, rendering, etc.

An animation design project carried out by students is evaluated on the basis of concept presentation, overall visual layout, storyboarding, and effective use of animation tools.  The project starts in the very beginning of the semester. Project is also evaluated in 4-5 phases, where regular feedback is given to students to further modify their work. 70-80% Students feels that the course is worthy and fruitful, though at the same time 30-40% students say that the work involved in creating animations is really tiresome.

The animation projects undertaken by the students are also theme based. Students have been offered variety of projects with well diversified themes every year. In 2002, our students started with creating small animation on various social themes like “SAVE WATER”, “NO SMOKING”, etc., In 2003, they were given a theme of creating animated Panchatatra stories, In the year 2004,  the theme was to create Animations on “How Stuff Works” in which they created animations explaining working processes of various small and big machines. In 2005 and 2006, they created animated e-learning modules on the basis of the courses they were studying. This project was done under close association of a subject expert (faculty member at JIIT), and the content of final animations were also verified by them. In 2007 and 2008, we moved towards creation of interactive educational multimedia which included interactive animated tutorials and quizzes, where we included lots of topics within their engineering curriculum. In 2009, our students created “3D Art & Science Exploratorium”, where each group of students worked on one animated display. In 2010, they created humorous animations. Each group had to un-simplify any routine task taken in-hand. Build a humorous story around how to accomplish that task using only machines (with minimum usage of hand).  In this project, students have created animation sequences, in which very simple tasks like “opening a book” or “lightening a lamp,” etc., are performed by an automated chain of mechanic tools like pulleys, springs, rollers etc.

Currently in 2011, students are working on creation of interactive educational animated stories and puzzles based on variety of topics on physics, mathematics, and logic. In future, we intend to expand “3D Exploratorium.” 

Multimedia Content and Animation Design

The third course, “Multimedia Content and Animation Design,” introduced in 2004, is an elective course open to all 4th year B.Tech. students. This Course focuses on the study of theory of multimedia and human-media interaction, and provides a background in research in the upcoming areas of multimedia interaction and experience design. The students are exposed to various creative as well as technical sub-processes in multimedia content and animation design by means of experiential learning. During the course, the students are well acquainted with various phases of multimedia project, various components of multimedia, theories of color, signs & symbols & their application in interaction design, principles of interactive multimedia, animation design, multimedia authoring environments and underlying philosophies,  and game design. The course also deals with various emerging areas of multimedia applications for Info-edu-tainment.

The students are evaluated on the basis of theory exams, various practical and design based assignments, and a project carried out in multimedia interaction design. A few typical examples of MMCAD class assignments were – planning multimedia kiosks; designing visual layouts out of a set of provided shapes and colors; creating a “game design;” etc.  For the take-home assignments,  students were asked to review interviews and videos on “the techniques used and  efforts gone in making latest animated advertisements/movies”, and then finally discussion on all this in classes, visit a 5D theatre, and share their experiences and understanding of technology used there. Around 200 students were divided into groups and were asked to do a detailed study of existing tools and current research with respect to some application areas.

In 2004 and 2005, students explored authoring tools like Macromedia Director and Flash and created interactive multimedia using them. They also worked on other tools like, Animo, 3D Studio Max, Adobe Premiere etc. Till 2009,   they were asked to prepare detailed project proposals as new applications of their literature studies in multimedia design. Many incomplete animation projects of earlier courses were completed by the students of this course in 2010. Every year,  this elective course attracts a large number of enrollments every year.

Minor Project and Mentoring

Apart from these three courses, many students also chose Multimedia for their minor projects (5 Credits). As their minor projects, a group of students have worked for the compilation and further modification of 3D exploratorium project in 2008, and in 2009, students have created a 45 minute long animated movie, “The Story of Physics”. A good numbers of students every year are willingly participating in students’ mentoring programme run by deptt. of CSE/IT, where final year students mentor juniors in their labs and project work. Students who performed well in multimedia courses at their own time have proved themselves to be wonderful mentors for their juniors too.  In 2007, a very interesting student, Kunal Raizada, who could not perform well in his own multimedia labs, volunteered to mentor multimedia lab of the juniors. In this engagement, he worked very hard as a mentor and we consider him as one of the best mentors till now.

The overall experience in handling Multimedia Courses in JIIT is awesome. In the span of these 9 years, we have come across the hidden creative instinct and love for design of a number of engineering students. Many students have shown remarkable performance in these courses. Some of those students are Pravesh verma (from 1st batch of JIIT), S. Pavani, Abhinav Shrivastava, Rohit Bhargava, Bhuvan Sachdeva, Aniket Bera, etc.  Student, like Vatsal Chaoji, and Akshan Ish realized the depth of their interest in the field of design and have changed their career paths from a engineer to designer. In words of Akshan Ish, a final year student who has passed entrance exams of NID and CEED (IIT Mumbai), “It was a pleasure to have MMDEV I course as part of the curriculum as it let me explore various possibilities, taught me to work on something. I eventually learned to love, and gave me the impetus to consider it as a serious career option.” An ex-student Vatsal Chaoji, says, “I did not know or learn any art before I joined this course… I can literally say that this course change the course of my life… I, now am a brand custodian at Circle Marcomm… and I feel this course help me self-actualize”.

Final Remarks

The strategy of lecture-cum-demonstration classes to supplement and further create a link to the theories, literature surveys, lab exercises, exploratory projects with continuous guidance and multi phase evaluation, project linking across various multimedia courses, and sometimes with other course as well, are the key techniques which have become a root cause of the popularity and success of multimedia courses in JIIT.