Three students are huddled together, deep in conversation. Next to them, a chart paper, some sketch pens, old newspapers and a bottle of glue are spread out on the floor. Another group of three has already started work on a project. A professor is walking around, holding a bunch of finished chart papers, with pictures ranging from Iron man to sea mammals drawn on them.
This is not a scene from an art class, but from the life skills programme being conducted at IIT-Madras.
Launched for the benefit of first-year undergraduates, the programme intends to break the ice and make the students feel at home in the campus. It is also designed to help them cope with pressure and guide them towards making the right decisions. “My experience has shown me that when students join the course, they have some communication issues. Therefore, we designed this programme to help them bond and, at the same time, teach them some important lessons that will help them throughout their course,” says Prof. MS Srinivasan, dean of students.
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He has been spearheading the programme along with Shiva Subramaniam, a guest faculty and Arul Jayachandran, Associate Professor, Department of Civil Engineering.
Interactive learning The programme was started as an experiment last year, has gone through some fine-tuning after feedback from the first batch and has emerged as a cross-cultural learning experience. New, interactive methods have been integrated along with greater student engagement. “Is teaching the only way to learn? We found that it was really difficult to engage with students if as many as 50 are present in class. Also, they tend to learn more outside the class, where they can interact freely and be more at ease. So, we came up with a way to make learning fun,” says Shiva Subramaniam. Students are divided into groups of five to facilitate interaction and learning takes place through fun exercises such as making posters, listening to speakers, and specially-designed workbooks. The focus is on three areas: communication, planning and systems thinking.
“The sessions are interesting. They’re different from the usual classroom lectures, which is refreshing. We also get to interact with other batch-mates and make new friends,” says Sharath, a first-year B.Tech chemical engineering student.
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Based on self-learning, sharing and peer-to-peer learning, the model is dependent on 60 volunteers who have been drawn from the senior batches to act as facilitators. So far, almost 950 freshers have been trained without the help of teachers.