(News) IIT-Bombay to Air Lectures from Today
IIT-Bombay to Air Lectures from Today
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 IIT-B 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 IIT-B, said engineering colleges will have to work on
"pre-requisites" 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.
Courtesy:- The Times of India
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