Good news for Engineering Students - TOI article - 2/1/08

IIT to air lectures live from today

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Mumbai: For lakhs of aspirants who don’t make it to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the new year has brought in cheer—this tech school is opening its classrooms beginning Wednesday for engineering colleges across the country.
As reported by TOI on December 8, IIT-Bombay will broadcast its lectures live through Edusat, the satellite which caters exclusively to the educational sector. Students of any engineering institute will now not only have real-time access to IITB tutoring, but can also interact with resident faculty at Powai.
Inaugurating the live interactive classroom, former TCS vice chairman F C Kohli said he had visited the MIT’s classrooms of the future and India needs to harness technology in education to a great extent. “I will not call this distance learning, but a classroom redesigned. This is virtual live education,’’ said Kohli, speaking on the IITB-ISRO initiative.
Hinting at the poor quality of education imparted in tier two engineering colleges, he said institutions need to realise they are not graduating “progressive technicians, but progressive thinkers and knowledge workers.’’ Kohli, who is also the chairman of the board of governors at the College of Engineering, Pune, which had invested in setting up a dedicated fibre optic line to transmit lectures from IITB, said engineering colleges will have to work on “prerequisites’’ before exposing their students to IIT-B lectures. “Basic pre-requisites, attendance when the course is on and follow-up are three essentials that colleges will have to keep in mind if they want to start offering the IIT courses,’’ the father of Indian IT said. Additional chief secretary (higher and technical education) Joyce Shankaran suggested that IITs look beyond engineering colleges and transmit lectures to polytechnics and science colleges too.
For IIT-B, director Ashok Misra pointed out that the initiative will go a long way in furthering the cause of education. IIT will start transmitting lectures from 8.30 am to 8 pm. Head of IIT’s centre for distance engineering education programme Kannan Moudgalya said almost 100 engineering colleges had already purchased ISRO receivers to access the live IIT-B lectures. To begin with, IIT-B will broadcast lectures in 13 courses, including software engineering, information systems, computation fluid dynamics, embedded systems, instrumentation and process control and fibre optics communication. “Besides, this initiative should be seen as an inclusive effort of all the IITs. Subject experts from other IITs and engineering colleges can also come to IIT-B and deliver lectures,’’ added Moudgalya.
toireporter@timesgroup.com