A Project for both Students & Faculties:
Using ICT to make learning at GTU an exciting experience:

Let me begin with a few questions for ourselves:

• Can learning be an exciting experience in our class-rooms?
• Can we prepare, for each of our subjects, power-point slides, which include pictures, animations and video-clips, in addition to statements and equations?
• Can we think of ways for making every laboratory exercise interesting and a voyage of discovery?

All of the above has been done in reputed universities of the West. MIT is great not only because 53% of its revenue comes from research or developments and only 9.3% comes from tuition fees but also because of excellence of its learning systems. Thus a lecture on Calculus for engineers begin with an example where calculus is used to design a useful product. Then the lecture moves on to equations and may end with an animation. Truly every lecture from the great professors of an ivy-league University is an exciting experience. A few great Universities of USA visualize themselves as ‘Jagadguru’ of today. Thus MIT has decided that it will put all of its teaching material on the web so that any one in the world can use it free of cost.

A Suggestion to Faculty members of those colleges/departments where all the continuous (or progressive) evaluation marks have not been allocated to a Mid-term test:

Please assign some marks for an assignment for preparing a set of power-point slides of one chapter in the course that you are teaching. Please distribute all the chapters of your course to the students of your class, by giving one chapter to a group of your students. Please send the power-point slides, prepared by your students, on a CD to Ms Roma Thakur at GTU (Her e-mail: roma_thakur@gtu.edu.in) at the end of the semester. GTU will give awards to the group of students, who prepare the best course-ware. GTU will put up the material on the web for the next year’s group of students.

If under-graduate students of the whole of the world are to learn from the learning material on the web, why the best of such material should come from only 10,894 students and 1,018 professors of MIT and why more than 3,50,000 students and 17,000 professors of GTU should not be able to prepare an equally exciting learning courseware for themselves? 

Let us all work to make GTU a great Learning University

Let us make Active Learning and Creating Excitement (ALCE) in the class a mass movement at GTU.

 

Dr. Akshai Aggarwal

(1 September 2012)