Thirty-seven hours of class-room teaching that is what has been made mandatory by Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University-Kakinada for all engineering students in the colleges affiliated to it. Faculty and management will adhere to this schedule from coming Monday, but are forced to sit and think – ‘All this at what cost'.
This regulation comes at a time when the University Directorate of Industry Interaction, Training, and Placement is zealously promoting alternative and better methods of pedagogy in engineering education through Wipro's Mission10X programme aimed at empowering the faculty through some innovative methods of teaching taking help of creative aids.
At the MIC College of Technology, with probably one of the best and latest infrastructure in terms of buildings, hardware, and software or library facility (including three-Terabite dump of e-books) a five-day training schedule for the faculty ended on Friday, but threw up several questions as to why none of the students uses the excellent facilities. Currently the college hardly finds time for its students to provide ‘free hour' during which they could resort to some creative learning. “We do not have answers for the repeated shunning of textbooks for some third-rate ‘All-in-One' books that provide you an instant answer from the semester examination point of you discounting quality of subject assimilation,” lament a few faculty members.
Meaningful curriculum
Some innovative extra-curricular activities to run in sync with curriculum to make teaching more meaningful and less boring for the student, small activity-based teaching and taking help of some innovative teaching aids, were some of the modules 32 faculty members learnt during the five days of fun-cum-serious training sessions.
Vijaya S. Kompella, one of the faculty members, comprehensively summarise the entire exercise for all by promising to not focus on just covering the syllabus they would concentrate on uncovering the loopholes in their ability to make students interested.
Terming the right role of a teacher as a facilitator, she said that they would stop looking at learners just as students, but try to understand their viewpoint too. JNTU Kakinada Director Training K. Padmaraju promised to support more such programmes. College secretary D. Panduranga Rao explained efforts being taken by them to continuously improve facilities on campus.
Wipro representatives P. Srinivas Reddy and G. Vamsi Krishna explained that 18,000 faculty members had been trained so far through this mission.
