In a bid to enhance teaching in core engineering and science subjects, Indian Institute of Technology- Bombay has taken an initiative to train teachers of engineering colleges across the country.
The two-week long pilot workshop on ‘Effective teaching/learning of Computer Programming’ beginning on December 14 at IIT-B will be reaching over 800 engineering college teachers from 22 different centres in the country.
The e-outreach programme implemented under the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (ICT) department of the Ministry of Human Resource Development utilises EDUSAT network of Indian Space Research Organisation, Dr. Kalpana Kannan, Manager of e-Outreach Project, said today.
Once this pilot project, which is meant to give a flavour of IIT’s teaching style to engineering colleges, becomes successful, 12 more such workshops, Dr. Kannan said, adding that all these workshops, will be conducted free of cost.
Although there are 70 EDUSAT centres in the country, it will be possible to conduct the training workshops in 22 centres for this pilot project, she said.
Lectures will be delivered by IIT faculty using two-way video broadcast facility of ISRO to multiple remote centres. The participating teachers will attend these lectures at a centre close to their own college, and will attend tutorial and lab sessions conducted in the same centre. Each centre will have a course coordinator, who will supervise the conduct of tutorials and labs.
Prof. D.B. Phatak, Chair Professor, and other expert faculty from department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT-Bombay, will train the teachers.
All the participating teachers will later contribute collaboratively to the contents. The final edited audio-visual contents including recorded lectures along with other course material will be released in open source through a portal. This can be freely used later by all teachers and students, Dr. Kannan said.
Computer Programming is taught in all engineering/MCA colleges in the country. An estimated 7,00,000 students study this subject every year, taught by about 7,000 to 10,000 teachers covering lectures, she said.
An added attraction for the participants will be the live recording of the workshop and other created contents, which would be released under Open Source through a portal, Dr. Kannan said.
