‘AICTE has transformed itself as a mentor of institutions with multiple supporting tools and initiatives’
Prof. Anil Sahasrabudhe, Chairman AICTE is an excellent personality full of skills and qualities that are essential for a CEO of a system as diverse and huge as AICTE, which is a regulator for more than 10000 technical institutions of the country. It was a Sunny Monday and we found some lucky moments to talk about few things and reflect on others.
Q: You are just completing around 3 years at AICTE. What are the things you were able to achieve and what are others that you will put into the category of ‘work under progress’?
Thank you Deepak for this conversation. Now it’s almost 3 years that I have joined at AICTE as chairman. Some of the challenges when I joined AICTE were large number of institutions with large number of vacant seats, quality of teaching & learning processes was poor, curriculum was not revised for a long time and related issues such as employability of graduates; essentially these were quality issues. We have expanded exponentially in terms of number of colleges and seats during last 2 decades but quality was not given much attention. The target for me was how do we improve quality. In the last 2 to 3 years, several initiatives have been taken to improve the situation. In one of the council meetings, we deliberated on this issue at length and drawn a 10-point agenda for improving quality. The progress on these points has been quite good and I am happy that most of them are now achieved. Let me narrate a few important ones.
1. Curriculum revision was a top priority because many universities did not revise their curriculum for a long time and outdated knowledge was being provided to students, creating problems of employability and related issues. We now have curricula for all the courses which are upgraded through a committee of experts drawn from IITs and industry, the number of credits has been reduced from about 200 credits for undergraduate program in engineering to about 160 credits; thereby students have lot of opportunity to work outside the class. Learning in class room is one part. But the learning which takes place outside the class room amongst peers, going to industry, internship, taking up small projects, working by hand, experiential learning is gaining more and more importance and we are attempting at that.
2. The second point is, lot of students who join engineering schools or for that matter any higher educational institute are found to have varied type of experiences before joining the engineering school. So, we have designed a 3 weeks long students’ induction program, whereby a level playing field is created for every student, whether he is from rural or urban background, English medium student or Hindi/regional languages medium student, whether he comes from rich family background/poor family background. I think there will be lot of interaction which can take place between faculty and a set of 20-25 students during this period, playing, exercises, doing Yoga together, group discussions, watching inspirational movies, motivational lectures by eminent achievers, all of which will create lot of enthusiasm among students and also develop bonhomie and ownership with the institution. Teacher-Student relationship shall also improve in the classroom and outside classroom during the next 4 years.
3. Teacher Training Program. Teachers were never trained when they joined the Institution. They may have the Masters & Ph.D. degrees, but as far as pedagogy is concerned, they were never trained in that. Therefore, we have designed 8 modules of one semester long program. Unless a teacher goes through the certification in these 8 modules of one semester long program, he/she will not become a regular teacher in any technical institution. So, this is a new venture we are doing.
Every institution should have an Industry-Institute cell for variety of activities. Internship is made mandatory either during summer vacations or one full semester as the case may be depending on institute or university curriculum. Then we have question papers, these are also very important to think about in outcome-based education (Washington accord accreditation is based on outcomes and India is a signatory). But how to test these outcomes is never known to our faculty members and therefore nature of question papers, standardization of question papers, how they are to be designed needs training. I think there is a lot to learn about this process which is missing, otherwise our normal question papers contain explain terms, define something, derive something, but whereas understanding, application of principles, innovation and creativity of the students are not tested at all. I think that is another area which we have also addressed.
We wanted to have single entrance exam which has not happened as on date because of certain compulsions. But otherwise all the quality initiatives which we are thinking about, they are rolled out. AICTE has become pro-active more as a facilitator than merely a regulator.
Q. Great to hear about your achievements. Apart from this also AICTE has initiated some programs having far reaching benefits. Can you elaborate on that?
Two-Three other important initiatives should be mentioned here, one of them is creation of MOOCs portal called SWAYAM, where the courses from the best possible faculty in the country are made available for students free of cost including transfer of credits to the extent of 20% of the curriculum and grades in such courses are transferred to their respective university transcripts.
We have another very interesting area of hackathons. We have started a smart India hackathon, second edition of which concluded on 31st March. The problems given by central govt. departments, ministries and state governments being solved by our young students. This was never heard of. This is a very innovative idea, development of a national open innovation model. The successful completion of second edition and many solutions of first edition being actually used by ministries shows the power of innovation of students.
We have another very interesting area of hackathons. We have started a smart India hackathon, second edition of which concluded on 31st March. The problems given by central govt. departments, ministries and state governments being solved by our young students. This was never heard of. This is a very innovative idea, development of a national open innovation model. The successful completion of second edition and many solutions of first edition being actually used by ministries shows the power of innovation of students.
As many as 340 odd different central and state govt. problems being given as challenge to our students. Our students in turn giving their innovative ideas for solving them. Shortlisting ideas from 1 lakh plus students to ten thousand students, conducting hackathon in 28 different centres simultaneously, 36 hours non-stop. I think the level of energy and level of challenge that the students are accepting, the kind of enthusiasm amongst students, their mentors, jury, and organisers is simply mindboggling and showing good results are coming out of that.
We also have other than these two great initiatives, tying of Unnat Bharat Abhiyan with Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana. We have linked these two programmes, one by the colleges adopting villages and MPs adopting villages, so that students can get exposure about the problems in the rural area and how their technical knowledge can be utilized for solving the problems of our fellow villagers. This is another area which has taken off, more than 800 institutions are participating, adopting about 3-5 villages each. I think this way we had wonderful experiences.
We have our own start-up policy which was initiated year-and-half ago. It is also picking speed. Lots of incubators are coming up in different institutions. And there are courses being provided on entrepreneurship while students are still studying in engineering, thereby at the end of 4 years rather than seeking jobs they can give opportunity to others to get jobs. This way, there are a variety of ways in which transformation is happening.
However, whatever good has happened is not fully satisfactory because there are still 40% vacant seats in technical courses. We need to attract may be not only students from within India into engineering but also from abroad, if we succeed in this initiative of study-in-India, those remaining 40% seats can also get filled from students coming from Middle East, South African and Asian countries because our education is affordable compared to any other country and if it also becomes highly qualitative, there is just no looking back.
Q: Indian education system is considered isolated, what initiative has been taken to integrate it with the rest of the world.
Accreditation is one important thing because of which we can get integrated with the rest of the world. We are signatory to Washington accord. Our degrees are equivalent to degrees secured in many other signatory countries. Thus scope of our degrees has already expanded. That is number one.
Number 2, because our system was not known to many other countries, we are still lacking in attracting students from abroad. We must visit different countries, organise road shows, attend conferences, seminars where different universities attend and create branding about India as an educational hub. People can come here and start studying.
Number 2, because our system was not known to many other countries, we are still lacking in attracting students from abroad. We must visit different countries, organise road shows, attend conferences, seminars where different universities attend and create branding about India as an educational hub. People can come here and start studying.
Q. What do you think about the next level of education coming with MOOCs? How the landscape is changing?
Landscape is gradually changing, still we need to have one to one interaction, lectures and classes are required. But never the less lot of dependence only on class room teaching learning is going to be eliminated because many courses, where not much of laboratory content or hands-on experience is required and only theoretical knowledge is required, such courses can easily be offered through MOOCs by one of the best professors available in the country. So, I think we are moving in that direction. We will have to see how it is accepted by students and faculty. Presently a maximum of 20% credits are allowed to be earned through MOOCs, may be the percentage may either reduce or increase depending on our experiences.
Q. You were a Professor at IIT Guwahati and now you are managing 10000 plus colleges and people say that you are the most approachable Chairman AICTE ever had. We hear a lot of good words from students, faculty and college managements about your working and handling of complex issues. Can you speak about your personal journey in this change of portfolio?
I had interesting experience of working in all variety of institutions, that was my forte. I started my education with a private but government aided institution, then went to IISc Bangalore, having got M.E and Ph.D from there, and a short stint in Tata Consulting Engineers, went all the way to Arunachal Pradesh, a central government institute viz., North Eastern Regional Institute of Science and Technology, having contributed in establishing right from scratch. Another IIT came up, the 6th IIT in the country in Guwahati. So, I was again involved right from beginning in IIT Guwahati, worked there for 11 years. Then came another opportunity.
I was invited for heading one of the oldest institutions in the country, College of Engineering, Pune at a time when it was slipping, and it was turned around in about a decade and I am very happy that it is now within the top 20 colleges in India. I think that experience really helped me, in initiating reforms in AICTE. AICTE is now not just giving approvals for starting new colleges, inspections etc as regulator but has become a true mentor and support institutions in multiple ways. We regularly go to stake holders, have interactions and therefore we understand ground reality and are in a position, to apply that in practice.
Q. How has been the reaction of your family throughout these three years. Are you able to give time?
That is a great difficulty in giving enough time to family members, but anyways children are settled, so there is no problem, they don’t expect my time. Most of the times, we work till late hours and go home late but at times it so happens that if by chance I go early, questions are asked, “Are you not well today, you have come early, hope everything is fine”. We have adjusted to that.
Q. You know that Bennett University has got significant funding for skilling our Institutions in AI and Deep Learning. How you see it in the journey of a prospective AI revolution in India.
It is very important. I am confident about the leadership and potential of Bennett University. Skilling and research in AI is one of the critical issues facing us. This initiative is a big step in that direction. AICTE will also try to support this project in upscaling so that it reaches more institutions, more teachers and more students with significant involvement from Industry.
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