For P.G. Biju, a faculty member of the Biochemistry Department at the University of Kerala’s Karyavattom campus, the method of student evaluation at Nottingham Trent University, U.K., came across as a novel experience during his three-week stay there.
“The evaluation method called learning process-based evaluation gives the student a chance to improve upon earlier failings. Once they submit an assignment, rather than considering the marks as final, they are given specific feedback on what went wrong, and are asked to resubmit. It is a continuous process of improvement,” says Mr. Biju.
FLAIRHe was part of a team of 10 young faculty members selected from arts and science colleges, engineering colleges, and universities in the State who returned from the U.K. last week after a 21-day internship in premier universities there under the leadership of the Higher Education Academy. The internship was part of the FLAIR (Fostering Linkages in Academic Innovation and Research) programme of the Department of Higher Education.
In those three weeks, they sat as listeners in various lectures, participated in campus seminars, interacted with students, and studied closely the way things were done there, as compared to that back home.
Shruthi Ramachandran, faculty member of the English Department at Government Women’s College, who did her internship at the University of Roehampton, was fascinated by the learning process there, which has almost fully gone online.
“The courses are designed by individual lecturers. The videos of the lectures are all available online. The lectures are typically three hours long, which gives the tutor enough space to go in deep into the topic being dealt with. The assignment submission is also through a dedicated website, which has a built-in plagiarism detection software. Feedbacks are provided online instantaneously,” says Ms. Ramachandran.
Steep feeShe also notes the cutting off of government funding, which has contributed to the course fee hitting the roof at Roehampton.
“Due to the huge fees that they are paying, the students are that much demanding on the teachers, and are clear about what they want. Although they appear to slack sometimes, as when they fiddle on their iPads during the lectures, they seem to make sure that they don’t fall behind,” she says.
Each of the 10 lecturers was asked to observe and come back with at least one ‘best practice’ there, which could be implemented here.
Ideas galore“The young lecturers came back with a bagful of promising ideas. For example, from the lecturer who went to the University of Bournemouth, we got the idea of a ‘review record’ of students, which keeps track of even small discussions between the faculty and the respective student, a practice which can help in the long run. At the University of Southampton, detailed course manuals are supplied before the classes start, which gives the students a clear idea of what is expected of them. At Nottingham Trent, students do project works by teaming up with students taking the same course in another university in Spain. We need to think about implementing some of these in our own colleges here,” says K.P. Jaikiran, Programme Director of FLAIR.
As part of the FLAIR programme, select faculty members from various colleges had earlier visited the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay; Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore; and International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore.
