Extended learning for Higher Educational Institutions

This is a copy of the letter that i sent to my director. It is outcome of my discussion with director sir on Sunday Feb 13.

Current situation in India

Currently out of lakhs of students that graduate every year about 5-10% of them are equipped with skills which are necessary for them to doing well when they join any industry or for that matter want to pursue higher education and an institution of repute. The reason for this is simple. They do not get the kind of education that should be imparted to them. And this is because there is lack of quality educational facility. And the most important of them is the high quality teachers and study material. Now, getting high quality teachers for so many institutions is not easy and is a very time consuming task. The other option is that educational institutions that have high degree of educational standards should help in raising the standards of other institutions that have similar courses. The focus of this short proposal is on ICT as the author does have necessary details about other braches of engineering.

What role can DA-IICT play in shaping the ICT education in INDIA?

We at DA-IICT have the privilege of having very good and competent professors. All we need is to harness this scarce resource. There are not many institutions where we have likes of Prof. Ranendra Biswas, Prof. Dipankar Nagchouduri, Prof. Ashok Amin, Prof. V P Sinha etc…to name a few. We can do numerous things. We can record the lectures, digitise the Course Lectures, we can prepare animations for helping in visualization of difficult concepts. Live streaming of lectures may not work as hard synchronization is needed for that and it may be possible every time. Now! We need to decide what all should be digitised and what animations should be made. This purely depends on individual courses. Talking with faculty teaching the course might be helpful. Courses of utmost importance are the foundation courses. Solid base is needed for building the students. I am presenting some courses that require immediate attention. The courses are:
1.Specific Topics in Structures Programming

• We need powerful animations to help students learn about pointers, stacks, Linked Lists, Trees, File handling. There are umpteen number of books available in the market.

2. Data and File Structure

• All the data structures can be very well understood when presented as an animation to the students. This will immediately strike the students as to what is going on there.

3. Linear Algebra

• There are specific topics which may be shown using animation to establish stronghold in key topics.

• It also requires lectures on important topics to be recorded and provided to students for offline viewing.

4. Basics of Communication System

• This course can immensely benefit from animations. Animations can be very effectively used for showing different kind of modulation techniques like Amplitude Modulation etc… This course is a very good candidate for animations.

• Recording of lectures is also needed

5. Digital Signal Processing

• This course requires all its lectures to be recorded and provide to students

• In addition, quality animation on important topics will enhance the understanding of students.

There are several other courses that need to be dealt similarly, but that will come later. This is a first step towards a new kind of education that will create revolutions.

From where will workforce come from?

Now, the question is who will make these things happen. The answer is, Students who have undertaken these courses. They need to have good understanding of the concerned course, as it will be needed to make correct animations. This will at the same time enhance the knowledge of the student, as there is no room for mistakes in animations. Few students can take up a course and distribute among themselves the topics that need to be dealt with. A senior student who has interest in the subject and did well can supervise them. And, when the animations have been made they can be discussed with the faculty about their content and correctness. Once thing that needs to be taken care of is that there should not be too much of spoon-feeding as it will not allow/motivate the student using it to think on its own. So the animations also need to be filled up with intelligent questions, review questions. There can be a variety of questions that can be put up in the animations.

What can it do INDIA?

I believe if the aforementioned task is done in time, we can make drastic impact on the students learning ICT courses. Once we have quality students, we will have quality work and at the end of it we will have a better shining INDIA, which will be a superpower in ICT. We will be having direct impact on lives of thousands of individuals that in turn will impact several others. Education is a means towards higher standards of living and quality individuals. This is a step in the right direction towards a new kind of learning, which has potential far reaching that those of conventional books. It will change lives forever. As said by Late. Shri. Dhirubhai Ambani “Knowledge is Power” and really it is.

We may also be able to generate money from this work.