Virtual IIT Can Bring Revolution
Posted : December 28, 2007 at 12:25 pm [IST]
Let me confess I did never get very much impressed by the quality of teaching at IIT at Kharagpur between 1957-1961, when I was there. As I can talk now, only few of the teachers were excellent. Most of them were just mediocre. I don’t remember if they followed any curricula and any specific book. Whatever they taught was not sufficient to understand the subject. They hardly provided any reading materials. I am sure things must be different now. For any course for a student after class XII, a specific book or a set of reading materials covering the curricula is a necessity. The teaching must make the student interested in reading additional books on the subject to further the knowledge. Unfortunately, I didn’t get anything like that from our teachers. And so I told one of my reputed teachers many years after passing out in a meeting that perhaps the students in a private school learnt more and knew better. IITians performed better in life as they were picked up from a huge number of brilliant students. Even without what they learnt at IIT they could have done excellent in life.
I am really happy that IITs are now talking of virtual courses. It will make the teaching transparent and bring in equity among the students.
A news report says, ‘Eighth IIT may be without a campus, a virtual one’.
As reported, steps are afoot to offer the technical excellence of the Indian Institutes of India to a larger population of students through a separate virtual IIT initiative rather than limiting it to only some 12,000 selected through the entrance examinations in which some 2.5 lakh participate.
Basically, all the existing IITs will be participating in this initiative.
The IIT faculty has already developed study materials for subjects such as mechanical, electrical, chemical, and computer engineering and these are available on line under its project NPTEL. While some content is expected to be in form of class notes, some lectures by the IIT faculty will be screened in video format.
IIT, Delhi is already working on creating virtual laboratories that can allow students to conduct experiments in a simulated mode. Simultaneously, the institutes can think of using the existing laboratories for the students of virtual IIT during the vacations or in another shifts.
To help clarify doubts and problems, the faculty could also interact with students occasionally.
The standard of courses offered by the virtual IIT will be of a standard comparable with the existing IITs. In order to maintain the high standards that are a hallmark of the IITs, the online IIT will follow strict admission criteria.
According to MS Ananth, Director IIT, Madras, “For this initiative to materialize what will be critical is bandwidth. One way out of the problem, at least initially, tying up with colleges having the required bandwidth for transmitting video programmes.
The best part of the virtual IIT will be that the services of the best teachers out of a big pool can be obtained to prepare the specific course. The course must be accessible to the students of all engineering colleges in India, if necessary at some fee to IITs. Local teachers will only be facilitators to students and devote time to upgrade their knowledge and/or get into research. The virtual institute will solve the problem of the shortage of good teachers to some extent also.
However, a group of experienced teachers and experts from the related industry must keep on updating the courses and making it more relevant and contemporary.
- Indra
Category: Employment/Education |
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Here is news report from TOI:
Gilbert Strang is a quiet man with a rare talent: helping others understand linear algebra. He’s written a half-dozen popular college textbooks, and for years a few hundred students at the elite Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been privileged to take his course.
Recently, with the growth of computer science, demand to understand linear algebra has surged. But so has the number of students Strang can teach.
An MIT initiative called “OpenCourseWare” makes virtually all the school’s courses available online for free - lecture notes, readings, tests and often video lectures. Strang’s Math 18.06 course is among the most popular, with visitors downloading his lectures more than 1.3 million times since June alone. Strang’s classroom is the world.
In his Istanbul dormitory, Kemal Burcak Kaplan, an undergraduate at Bogazici University, downloads Strang’s lectures to try to boost his grade in a class there. Outside Calcutta, graduate student Sriram Chandrasekaran uses them to brush up on matrices for his engineering courses at the elite Indian Institute of Technology.
Many “students” are college teachers themselves, like Sheraz Khan at a small engineering institute in Peshawar, Pakistan, and Noorali Jiwaji, at the Open University of Tanzania. They use Strang and other MIT professors as guides in designing their own classes, and direct students to MIT’s courses for help.
Others are closer to MIT’s Cambridge campus. Some are MIT students and alumni, while others have no connection at all - like Gus Whelan, a retiree on nearby Cape Cod, and Dustin Darcy, a 27-year-old video game programmer in Los Angeles who uses linear algebra regularly in his work.”Rather than going through my old, dusty books,” Darcy said, “I thought I might as well go through it from the top and see if I learn something new.”
There has never been a more exciting time for the intellectually curious. The world’s top universities have come late to the world of online education, but they’re arriving at last.
MIT’s initiative is the largest, but the trend is spreading. More than 100 universities worldwide, including Johns Hopkins, Tufts and Notre Dame, have joined MIT in a consortium of schools promoting their own open courseware.
Posted by: Indra at January 1, 2008 @ 4:03 pm
Here is what OP Khanna opines:
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read your views on IITs and the future of engineering education.
Your blog was provocative as any good blog should be. I offer my appreciation to you for that.
Please pardon me if I say that my views are slightly different than yours on a part of the blog.
I feel one learns more from one’s peers than the teachers. As you said, IIT KGP- then the only IIT attracted the best of students from the best of the Universities and Colleges. On that count we had a different literary atmosphere compared to other institutes. That environment was the important ingredient that made most of us different than students from other colleges.
Another point to note is that if the IIT -the only IIT then had the level of teachers what we know, what grade of teachers would have been attracted by ordinary institutes then.
At this stage of maturity, the best of teachers in India then would look very mediocre to us. The condition would be similar, only to a more disappointing degree, in case of other technical colleges then.
However I would 100% agree with you on scope & potential of virtual learning.
Regards.
O P Khanna
Posted by: Indra at January 1, 2008 @ 4:05 pm
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