IIT Hyderabad has hit upon a novel idea of offering fractional courses to provide their students with exposure to cutting-edge knowledge and other social issues even as they complete their course.
One of the fractional courses “Empowering three billion” is being conducted by former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam on empowering the world's population and he will share his ideas on how to make it a reality.
He has already taken seven hours of lectures and will be visiting for some more hours of lectures in March.
Last year, similar fractional courses were offered by Adobe and another industry on cloud computing. Two more courses on Finance and Sales and Marketing will be offered this year.
Similarly, the institute is introducing a B.Tech course in Engineering Science from this year. Students opting for it will study broad-based engineering for two and half years while the last one and half years they can specialise in any subject.
They can choose either subjects from different engineering streams like EEE, Mechanical, Civil or Computer Science or even non-engineering subjects like Economics and Psychology. “It's an innovative course being offered for the first time in any IIT,” Prof. Desai says.
With regard to students passing out from the new IITs not getting the degrees, Prof. Desai says that they will get a provisional certificate while the degree would be given to them once the Rajya Sabha clears the Institutes of Technology Act 1961 after incorporating the new IITs. The Lok Sabha has already passed the Bill.
However, there is no problem with employment for such students. In fact, all 30 from the first batch of M.Tech from IIT Hyderabad have been placed and are doing well.
This year about 160 students will graduate. “There will be absolutely no problem even for these candidates,” Prof. Desai says.
