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eDU | volume 03 | Issue 03

A 9.9 Media Publication March 2012 www.edu-leaders.com

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educ ation

FOR LEADERS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Rangan Banerjee Dean(R&D) IIT Bombay

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Welcome

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A red carpet welcome awaits Indian academics from abroad. Institutions like IIT-B show how to reverse the brain drain Pg 14

Pradyumna Vyas Director, National Institute of Design P56 campus

The intellectual living rooms of campuses are now tech treasure troves P32 technology

Software platforms that enable rich interactions on an IT-enabled campus P38 The Disruptive Educational Research Conference

Learning today involves communities of practice. At EdgeX 2012, experts discuss disruptive technologies that aid it | Page 45

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FOREWORD Returning for good and about time too!

“Over the years, the reason to return home was primarily personal or patriotic in the absence of attractive professional opportunities”

y IIT-K classmate, Prof Prabhu Aggarwal, recently returned to India, after 25 years in the US to join Jindal Global University as Vice Dean. He contributed to brain drain in 1986 and is now part of the growing brain gain in India’s higher education. What used to be a trickle of returning academics is slowly but surely becoming a steady flow. At Indian School of Business (ISB), there are now over 50 permanent faculty members who have returned after completing their PhDs and working in top US universities. This, in addition to the many more, who ‘visit’ for short stints every year. While the Government of India continues to struggle with its Brain Gain Policy, EDU looks at what higher education institutions are doing to attract Indian academics living overseas back home. Being a returnee Indian myself, I have guided several professionals back to India, since I finally came back in 1997 as a management consultant after having failed to find a suitable professional opportunity to come back to as an academic in 1991. Over the years, the primary reason to return home was primarily personal or patriotic in the absence of attractive professional opportunities. It was difficult to expect academics to come back unless the personal situation—a combination of spousal concurrence, presence of either very young or college-going children, need of ageing parents—was strongly in favour. However, in the more recent past there seems to be a greater professional pull that is attracting academics back. The tremendous growth of high-quality and well-endowed higher education institutions has now become a big draw for returning Indians. Infrastructure, good schools for kids, employment for spouses and proximity to parents still matter a lot, but the professional alternative of working as an academic in India is an added attraction. Equally, more and more academics are ‘visiting’ either to test the waters before taking the plunge or as a compromise to not being able to move back full-time for personal reasons. The Brain Gain Brigade finds students in India smarter and more engaged, greenfield research opportunities more rewarding, and opportunities to build institutions from scratch more fulfilling and worthwhile. About time!

Dr Pramath Raj Sinha pramath@edu-leaders.com

March 2012 EduTech

Contents EDU march 2012

update 04 05 06

award eco hut FUNDS appointed selection

Viewpoint 10 Ganesh S Business simulation games can act as game changers for business education

Technology 38 The Learning Community The next level of IT enablement of a campus is utilising software platforms like videos effectively By Shankar Venkatagiri 43 Tech tutes Do It Yourself Video Lectures By Tushar Kanwar

45 tech event Experts at the EDGEX 2012 talk about disruptive games simulations and online programmes that are changing learning By Charu Bahri

I have always believed that self-belief is the strongest support to navigate life —Pradyumna Vyas, Director NID

EduTech March 2012

56 Pradyumna Vyas The Director of National Institute of Design is as unorthodox in thoughts as he is in his designs By Charu Bahri

Global perspective Find out what’s currently happening in institutions around the world. The Chronicle of Higher Education shares its perspectives with EDU

campus 32 Long live the library Despite technological advances, library is still the heart of any campus, albeit with a few welcome changes By Teja Lele Desai

profile

50 Fall of Libyan Regime Brings New Opportunities for American Universities By David L Wheeler

53 Scholars Seek Better Ways to Track Impact Online By Jennifer Howard

FOR LEADERS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Managing Director: Pramath Raj Sinha PUBLISHING DIRECTOR: Anuradha Das Mathur Group Editor: R Giridhar managing editor: Smita Polite

cover Story

14 WELCOME BACK HOME

Copydesk Managing EDITOR: Sangita Thakur Varma SUB EDITORS: Radhika Haswani, Mitia Nath

The Government of India is going all-out to woo professors of Indian origin to return ‘home’. Has that enthused the overseas Indian academic community enough though?

16 The Return of the Prodigies 26 Rangan Banerjee, Dean R&D at IIT

Bombay on the efforts of his institute to bring back Indian academics settled abroad

28 Vivek Bhandari, former director of IRMA on why he returned home 30 Prashant Kale, Assistant Professor at Wharton School on what would bring him back

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Hitachi BC This index is provided as an additional service. The publisher does not assume any liabilities for errors or omissions. VOLUME 03 ISSUE 03

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EDU | VOLUME 03 | ISSUE 03

A 9.9 MEDIA PUBLICATION MARCH 2012 WWW.EDU-LEADERS.COM

FOR

LEADERS

HIGHER

EDUC ATION

FOR LEADERS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Rangan Banerjee Dean(R&D) IIT Bombay

PROFILE

WELCOME

WWW.EDU-LEADERS.COM

BACK HOME

A red carpet welcome awaits Indian academics from abroad. Institutions like IIT-B show how to reverse the brain drain Pg 14

Pradyumna Vyas Director, National Institute of Design P56 CAMPUS

The intellectual living rooms of campuses are now tech treasure troves P32 TECHNOLOGY

Software platforms that enable rich interactions on an IT-enabled campus P38 The Disruptive Educational Research Conference

Learning today involves communities of practice. At EDGEX 2012, experts discuss disruptive technologies that aid it | Page 45

Cover Art: peterson

Please recycle this magazine and remove inserts before recycling

March 2012 EduTech

from the world of higher education

05 eco hut 05 funds 06 appointed 06 selection & more

Anuj Bidve Scholarship at Lancaster Lancaster University, UK, has announced the annual Anuj Bidve Memorial Scholarship for Indian students. The scholarship will be given to a student graduating from University of Pune to pursue Msc in Engineering at Lancaster University. It will fund tuition fees and accommodation in the university. Prof Mark E Smith, Vice Chancellor of Lancaster University stated that this scholarship was in keeping with the wishes of the Bidve family whose son, a student at the Lancaster University, was recently murdered.

Bihar govt to create smaller universities Recognition: HRD Minister Kapil Sibal acknowledges the need for recognising the contribution of social sciences to country’s development

Amartya Sen Award Announced The award to be given to 10 top social scientists annually in recognition of their contributions in the field of social sciences Award The government has announced an award for social scientists in the name of Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen. The award will be given to 10 top social scientists every year. Human Resource and Development Minister Kapil Sibal said, “For scientists we have the Bhatnagar awards, but nothing for social scientists. We have proposed 10 annual awards to recognise advancement in the field of social science.” The HRD ministry is also planning to establish a new social science research centre. Sibal said, “We should uplift the quality of research in social science so that policymakers can get appropriate data for making policies.” Talking about the proposed innovation centre for social science, the minister said that the aim behind setting up such a centre is to develop capacity in new and frontier areas of transdisciplinary research. He said that a committee was set up to suggest raising research activities as adequate social research is critical in a country where social-sector investment is vital for development.

EduTech March 2012

In accordance with the latest UGC guidelines, higher education institutions in Bihar will witness some major restructuring soon. This move, aimed at creation of more universities and smoother functioning of existing ones, will involve bifurcation of some universities to establish smaller ones. Education Minister, PK Shahi said that a proposal, recommending creation of smaller universities, has already been submitted to the department by the director of higher education.

LN Bhagat appointed new VC of Ranchi University Noted academician Laxmi Narayan Bhagat has been appointed Vice Chancellor of Ranchi University. A four-member committee, constituted by the Governor of Jharkhand, Syed Ahmed, had proposed his name. Prior to this appointment, Bhagat was the director of Institute of Science and Management (ISM), Ranchi, since August 2010. He has also served as registrar in Ranchi University and was senior professor of economics there.

update

It’s Back to Nature at KU Kerala University turns back the clock with classes in Eco Hut and planting for the future ecohut It’s history revisited at the newly built Eco Hut at the department of computational biology and bio informatics in the Kerala University campus at Kariavattom. The setting reminds you of the gurukuls and ashrams of yore when the venerable sages taught the princes in the open under the trees and made them learn to live with the rigours of nature. The eco hut with its floor covered with cowdung, walls built by mat made of pineapple leaves (thazhapaya) and bamboo and the roof thatched by palm fronds, takes one back to the rough and tumble of village life. Head of the Department, Achuth Sankar S Nair takes pride in taking classes in the strictly eco hut where no manmade items or polluting elements are allowed within touching distance. Hence, plastic

is banned and no chairs are allowed in. There is no electricity either. The hall can seat 125 persons, who sit on handmade mats. The department plans to hold seminars and conferences in the hut and the third day session of Bioinformatica Indica 2012 (an international event which is held biannually by the Natural: Participants at Indica 2012 in front of the department) in January last, Eco Hut sitting on handmade eco mats was one of the first to be held in it. Several dignitaries, including former The department has another green inieducation minister MA Baby and Nobel tiative launched in 2009, called ‘A tree Laureate Johann Deisenhofer have plantfor 2100 AD’. Under this new trees are ed saplings in the campus under the planted around the department and ‘Tree for 2100 AD project’. cared for by students.

Wealth Gap Widens at the Top of HE in the US funds The latest annual college fundraising figures of the annual Voluntary Support of Education survey by Council for Aid to Education show donations to colleges and universities rose 8.2 per cent in fiscal 2011, crossing back the $30 billion mark for just the second time ever in the US. It was also evident that the richest universities accounted for nearly half the growth, with $8.2 billion, or 27 per cent, of the $30.3 billion collected by colleges and universities nationwide, being raised by just the top 20 institutions. At these universities, fundraising was 15.3 per cent higher than in 2010, widening an already yawning wealth gap at the top of higher education. The elite group was led by Stanford University, which recently broke an all-time record by completing a five-year, $6.2 billion fundraising campaign, leading with $709.4 million collected in fiscal 2011, followed by Harvard ($639.2 million) and Yale ($580.3 million). MIT ($534 million) was at No. 4. Private universities such as Columbia and Johns Hopkins and top public universities such as UCLA and Universities of Texas, Wisconsin and North Carolina rounded off the list.

global update

8.2%

rise in donations to colleges and universities

27%

of the total raised by just the top 20 institutions

March 2012 EduTech

update

First Woman President of COL is Indian Prof Asha Kanwar, a leading advocate of learning for development and current VP of the Commonwealth of Learning, has been appointed its President and CEO Appointed Kanwar succeeds Sir John Daniel, whose term as Commonwealth of Learning (COL) President ends on May 31. Kanwar has over 30 years of experience in teaching, research and administration and has written several books, research papers and articles. She has made significant contributions to gender studies, especially the impact of distance education on the lives of Asian women. She is also a recipient of several awards and fellowships, including the International Council for Distance Education (ICDE) Prize of Excellence. Announcing her appointment, Burchell Whiteman, OJ, Chair of COL’s Board of Governors and former Jamaican minister of education and culture, said: “Prof Kanwar with her profound

knowledge and rich experience of open and distance learning and vision for Laurels: Prof Asha Kanwar is a renowned educationist and an expert on open and distance education COL will take it to a new level of humanities at the Indira Gandhi through a process of significant and National Open University and pro-vice sustainable evolutionary change. chancellor of the university from 1999 to Her personal attributes and her 2000. Prior to joining COL, she worked international profile should prove to be in Africa as a consultant in open and disvaluable assets.” tance learning at UNESCO’s Regional Kanwar joined COL in 2003 as educaOffice for Education in Africa (BREDA) tion specialist, higher education and in Dakar, Senegal. The COL was created became its vice president in 2006. Her by Commonwealth Heads of Governcurrent role includes specific responsiment at their meeting in Vancouver in bility for stakeholder engagement and 1987. Kanwar will take up her duties on programme direction. June 1, 2012. She was earlier director of the school

Update

Race Begins for Post of UGC Chairman Confusion over UGC age clause as most candidates in 62-64 age bracket Selection According to reports, the three-member search-cum-selection committee for the appointment of UGC chairperson, is only a few steps away from finalising their candidate. The committee comprising Madhavan Menon, Goverdhan Mehta and Srinath Reddy, has already shortlisted five candidates, of which three will be sent to the HRD ministry after personal interactions with each of them. The shortlisted candidates are: Prof Ved Prakash, Acting Chairman of UGC, Prof Syed

EduTech March 2012

E Hasnain, former VC of Hyderabad Univ e r s i t y, P r o f Surabhi Banerjee, VC of Central University of Orissa, Prof Pankaj Chandra, Director of IIM Bangalore and Prof A Jayakrishnan, VC of University of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram. It is also reported that HRD Minister Kapil Sibal may need to step in, regarding the confusion that is ensuing over the age clause of the eligibility criteria.

update

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EduTech March 2012

“In the last 20 years, 13 students from China have won the International Mathematical Olympiad... India hasn’t won once...in the coming 15 years, all Nobel Prize winners will come from China”

—Anand Kumar, Ramanujan School of Mathematics

4. Publisher’s name

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“The evidence is strong from the UK that those members of society who have had a positive experience of postcompulsory education live healthier, happier and more democratically tolerant lives”

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Viewpoint

Ganesh S

The Game Changer

usiness simulation games when integrated into business education can help equip a new breed of management professionals with real-life skills for the dynamic 21st century business world â&#x20AC;&#x201C; much like pilots who are taught aircraft dynamics through simulator training.

The prevailing global economic crisis has persuaded most business schools across the world to retrospect the design and delivery of their business education curriculum. Management education is very much experiential. There are little cook-book off-the-shelf recipes and decisions are highly context related. Business simulations provide a learning process whereby participants get the opportunity to experiment with a wide variety of situations, learn through trial and error in a very safe environment, and above all, manage a competitive situation where results depend not only on their decisions but also on their competitions. A business simulation game is an interactive, structured training activity, with specially created conditions, which aim to reproduce those of a working situation that take place in a successful business. Management simulations are an extension of the case-based learning methodology. In a case study, participants are expected to put themselves in the shoes of a protagonist, analyse the situation from his/her viewpoint and then make decisions in response to a business problem faced by the protagonist. This business problem usually pertains to the learning objective of the case discussion. In a management simulation, every participant is a protagonist faced with a

EduTechâ&#x20AC;&#x192; March 2012

business situation, which s/he has to assess and make decisions about, pertaining to the business problem. However, a simulation makes the business environment come alive by showing participants the outcomes of their decisions and thus provides a forum for discussion based on decisions and outcomes, rather than just decisions. A business has also to remain competitive, so business games are usually competitive in character with compressed time periods, allowing the result of decisions and policies to be seen.

Skills to Learn It would be wrong to suggest that one business management game can cover all the personal and management skills involved. Different games target different skills. For example, one activity might concentrate on communication, feedback, leadership and team skills, while another will cover problem-solving, decision-making, managing resources and budgets. Participants learn more than theory by practical experience, they learn about themselves and others. Team roles and skills are the key components in a business management game, therefore, team building development is enhanced and the practical value of group dynamics is demonstrated. It enables participants to hone their understand-

Viewpoint

Ganesh S

Games Managers Play

The following are the three most popular games that we picked from the internet. They are realistic, fun and user-friendly.

Business Tycoon

Virtonomics

eRepublic

That over 600,000 people worldwide are playing this game is enough to convey its popularity. Made by Dovogame, its simple, easy to play and fun with lots of twists and turns on traditional business simulators. Business Tycoon Online promises realistic financial accounting, business interaction, trade and commerce, empire building, and even shady business deals and corporate sabotage.

An intense realistic game, Virtonomics has over 700,000 registered users and is perhaps the longest running business and economic simulation game on the internet. It needs some real studying to understand how to play the game and interact within the simulated Virtonomics business model. But once you master it, it is fun. A great game for serious managers.

This an intricate and beautifully designed game that reflects 21st century business world and life in general. You can just log in for a few minutes every day and keep your game up. Not the best ways to learn hard core commerce, but you can still enjoy the game and learn over time. It has 700,000 players from all over the world.

ing of a management concept through repeated application in a virtual environment, very similar to the way pilots are taught aircraft dynamics and handling through simulator training.

Business Strategy Knowledge There are different activities for all levels. With most games the trainer can make the game more or less demanding by supplying different amounts of information; reducing the number of input variables and decisions required; varying the time allowed or targeting specific issues. Business strategy games enable participants to practice management skills often developed in isolation from other elements of the system.

From Training to Workplace An important part of any training activity is the debrief. Here the process and analysis of results also gives participants good learning experience of the organisation and group working skills. All that it requires is the facilitation by trainers who are familiar with the processes involved. Effective links can then be made between the learning and work applications appropriate to the group and

EduTech March 2012

the individuals within it.We believe that training should be: a) Active; b) Challenging; c) Interesting; d) Enjoyable; e) Focussed on key issues; f) Memorable These ingredients stimulate a high-level of motivation in participants in developing skills to improve their individual and team performance. These, with continued support, are transferred to the workplace. In business simulations participants not only have to define their strategy to resolve a given problem but also have to adapt it to the competitive situation, when to react, when to stay put is the classical dilemma executives have to manage. The business simulation games are challenging and enjoyable; developing skills to improve individual and team performance in the workplace. By experiencing rather than discussing a model, participants gain in knowledge, competence and confidence. “I hear I forget, I see I remember, I do I understand.” – Confucius As a result, management simulations are emerging as an effective experiential learning aid in management courses among B-schools and corporates alike.

Author’s BIO Ganesh S is Chief Mentor of an initiative named Campus Levers started by an alumni group of Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIM-C). The initiative is aimed at supporting academic institutes and the student community to understand the real business world with aid of systems and tools that impart business learning in a practical way.

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COVER STORY

Brain Gain

Welcome

back

home

EduTechâ&#x20AC;&#x192; March 2012

by Padmaja shastri

Inside 16

The Return of the Prodigies

Bringing Back Alumni

Drawn by India in Transition

The Right Ambience

Rangan Banerjee, Dean R&D, IIT Bombay

Vivek Bhandari, former director, IRMA

Prashant Kale, Prof Wharton School

March 2012 EduTech

By Peterson

The Government of India is going all-out to woo professors of Indian origin to return ‘home’. Has that enthused the overseas Indian academic community enough?

cover story

Brain Gain

The

Returnof the Prodigies Even as the Government of India puts the final touches to a welcome package, the ‘Brain Gain Policy’, better opportunities in India Shining are providing an irresistible pull to bring the flock back home. Their homecoming is timely, given the educational needs of a developing nation

ver the past three decades, Dr Sadanand Nanjundiah, Professor of Physics at Central Connecticut State University, thought of coming back to India several times. He even sought the assistance of the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Government of India (GoI) and the Indian Embassy at Washington DC in 1985. While the Indian Embassy never responded, he received a rather rude reply from the MHRD. “Margaret Alva (the then Minister of State, MHRD) actually wrote back to me saying that India did not need the services of people like me,” tells Nanjundiah. Cut to 2012. The MHRD is giving final shape to its Brain Gain Policy (See pg 18). As per the policy note, it is pulling out all stops to motivate Indian diaspora to return home to start with creating a climate of excellence at India’s 14 Innovation universities. “We will extend it to other institutions of excellence (IoEs) also, in due course. Meanwhile, we have to build a set of objective criteria as to what is an IoE,” says a senior official of the MHRD. The ministry is also considering a proposal by Dr Sam Pitroda to set up a global fund of $500 million to attract select professors and researchers to India. A year back, it launched a webpage for non-resident Indians (NRIs) and persons of Indian origin (PIOs) on its website. The page says, “This is going to be your window to

EduTech March 2012

opportunities in higher education sector back home. India is taking giant strides in the field of education and you can be a part of this journey…” In fact, in early 2011, Kapil Sibal, Minister of HRD, GoI, in a special edition of MHRD newsletter brought out on the occasion of Pravasi Bharatiya Diwas, said, “The knowledge sector in India needs the creative potential and the strategic vision of global talent particularly those of Indian origin.”

India Calling The government is clearly opening its arms wide to woo the best of Indian academics abroad. But even when there was no clear policy or intent to embrace them, there were some Indians teaching abroad who would return home. They were mainly spurred by a desire to contribute to nation building and give back to society they had been part of. “I just wanted to come back and work for the country,” says Dr Ashok Jhunjhunwala, the renowned professor at Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M). Jhunjhunwala got his MS and PhD degrees from University of Maine and taught as assistant professor at Washington State University for two years before he joined IIT-M in 1981, a time when the institute did nothing particular to attract talent. Around the same time, Sudhir K Jain, Director, IIT

Brain Gain

Gandhinagar, also returned after a PhD at CalTech to teach at IIT Kanpur as he felt a strong sense of engagement with India and gets a high sense of worth by contributing to the country. “I have been an earthquake safety activist and of late an academic administrator. In both areas, India provided me great opportunities to do things that gave me the greatest satisfaction,” he says. But Jhunjhunwala and Jain were among a small band of people then. “Today there is much more readiness among (global) Indians to come back,” observes Jhunjhunwala. He is right. In fact, Dr Debashis Chatterjee, Director, Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Kozhikode, says that he receives one application every month from India-born professors in the US, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. “Many of them are tenured professors or those who would get their tenure anytime. Around 25 per cent of the 30 new professors we have added

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in the last two-three years are from the US,” he says. He is not alone. His counterparts at various top notch higher educational institutes (HEIs) like the IIMs, IITs, International Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs) and Indian School of Business (ISB) are experiencing a similar influx. “About a quarter of our staff had taught abroad before coming to ISB and almost all our faculty have PhDs from top-grade schools abroad,” says Ajit Rangnekar, Dean, ISB. However, Chatterjee and his ilk do not have too much hard-selling to do these days. “India is selling itself,” he says.

Favourable Climes While the gross domestic product (GDP) of most developed nations in Europe and the US is growing at less than three per cent, India’s GDP growth rate continues to hover at around eight per cent. That

ISRO: Wedding Science & Sentiment How common vision and goal of nation building overcame personal motivations

he Indian National Committee and researchers working with for Space Research National Aeronautics and Space (INCOSPAR), the precursor to Administration (NASA) and the formation of the Indian Space universities in the US and UK Research Organisation (ISRO), was including Dr UR Rao and Dr Vasant founded in 1962 with Dr Vikram Gowarikar left their high paying jobs Sarabhai as its chairman. It was a and returned to be part of the core little after the USSR launched team of ISRO. “As far as I remember, Sputnik 1 and 2 and the US its own they were offered nothing more than artificial satellite, Explorer 1. In 1963, an air ticket and were paid salaries India launched its first rocket Nike as per the standard government pay Apache. But that was imported from scales. Money did not matter, as they the US. were all driven by the challenge of Sarabhai, known as the father of building something of national India’s space programme, consequence from the ground up. ISro got people back not with envisaged India to making its own money but with the challenge of Sarabhai had a clear vision about building something of national rockets and satellites and launching India’s space programme in his mind consequence them. For that he started assembling a and he made it a point to discuss it team, with experts in various disciplines both from with all of us late into the evenings,” says Kale, who was government research labs in India and research and part of ISRO’s initial team. Also, since everyone had a academic institutions abroad. He made concerted clearly defined role and had to work towards a efforts to get back most of his senior students in the US common national goal of developing India’s space and other countries. “Whenever he travelled for work programme, they all stuck on, he says. According to and conferences abroad, Dr Sarabhai met and Kale, it was mainly the congruence of the goals of the interviewed various people interested in coming back,” organisation/nation and of the returnees that ISRO says Dr Pramod Kale, former director, Vikram Sarabhai could successfully bring back Indian scientists, who Space Centre, ISRO. As a result, many Indian scientists stayed on.

March 2012 EduTech

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Brain Gain

Netting Diaspora with Policy Bait

The GOI recognises the importance of attracting and retaining Indian talent. (Excerpts from the concept note of Brain Gain Policy prepared by MHRD)

he Government recognises that…knowledge universities aims to provide the right environment to does not recognise frontiers but the offshoots of enable the knowledge talent around the world to cluster knowledge development could…provide an in the Innovation universities proposed to be developed impetus to finding solutions to economic and social as global centres of innovation. problems of the nation… The government shall ensure that the governance If excellence in research and teaching are the structure of the university shall be tuned towards essential elements of a world-class institution, the ensuring complete autonomy over all matters ability to attract and retain outstanding faculty from all specifically academic matters… over the world would be The national universities central to this shall be kept out of the approach. purview of the regulatory The Indian diaspora oversight of the existing of highly skilled regulatory bodies in higher knowledge workers education. have been at the Academia shall have full forefront of growth and freedom in research and in development in the the publication of results developed nations. arising out of such This diaspora, given research. Researchers shall the right incentives have the freedom to patent and challenges, could the results of their research be the seeds for the jointly with the university concentration of talent without getting the same from across the world approved or validated by in the 14 national the university universities proposed administration or by any to be established. government agency or Highly skilled indian workers have been The policy to attract authority… Teachers shall at the frontiers of growth in developed nations talent to the innovation have full freedom to

means, the decision to return to India is no longer entirely driven by patriotic fervour, but has also begun to make sound economic sense. It has also become easier to relocate to India. Since 2005, PIO with foreign citizenship, have the option of an Overseas Citizenship of India card which gives them a lifelong visa to India and allows them to work in private Indian institutions. Huge budget cuts for higher education, after the recent economic recession, in the US and other Western countries, are pushing their universities to downsize. That is resulting in job cuts, faculty freezes, forced vacations for professors and a drop in tenured positions. So, chances of a good academic

EduTech March 2012

career in the US, UK and Europe seem bleak, whereas India still needs many more PhDs to keep pace with its fast-growing economy. Plus, getting a green card is much harder now. Thus, growing opportunities in India are becoming a big lure for Indian academics abroad. No wonder, well-known economist and Professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver, Dr Kishore Kulkarni wishes that he was younger today and at the start of his career, so that he could come back to India for good. “Right now, India is most attractive. Salaries have increased considerably. Also, there are way too many openings now and the demand for good teachers is surpassing the supply,” he says.

Brain Gain

structure the pedagogy including its delivery by them within the broad parameters of the programmes objectives set by the Academic Body… The government recognises that adequate funding is essential to support the university’s research and teaching… A research endowment fund of an adequate amount not less than Rs 200 crore per university shall be provided annually. Once approved, a research group shall have the freedom to utilise the grants…to procure aids and equipments required for research, to appoint research associates and research assistants and to decide remuneration to be paid to them. The amount spent by the university or its academics on research or teaching shall be kept out of the purview of audit scrutiny envisaged under the Constitution by the Comptroller and Auditor General. An amendment to that effect shall be made in the Comptroller and Auditor General’s (Duties, Powers and Conditions of Service) Act, 1971. The University shall have the freedom to establish chairs of studies with funding through nongovernment endowments to be occupied by professors of

eminence…the university shall have the freedom to define its own appointment criteria for making appointments to academic positions in the university. Recognising that brilliance is not a factor of age of a person or years spent in research, the appointment by invitation shall not be subject to limitations of age or years of experience of the considered candidate. Faculty at the level of professor shall be offered tenured service to provide job security. The university shall also have the freedom to define the pay structure through a negotiated arrangement...for its senior faculty…to attract talent from all over the world, including persons involved in pathbreaking research in industry. The Citizenship Act, 1955, as amended in 2003, does not allow persons of Indian origin who are citizens of another country to be appointed to public services and posts in connection with the affairs of the Union. In order to ensure that the highly skilled Indian diaspora is able to participate in the development of world-class institutions in the country, a suitable enactment or notification, as may be required, shall be made to remove this limitation

Sun Rises in the Sector That’s no surprise. India is aiming for a gross enrolment ratio (the per cent of the population in the age group of 18-24 years which gets enrolled in colleges) of 30 per cent by 2020, from 12 per cent in 2010. This would mean an enrolment of 40 million students, an increase of 24 million from the current enrolment. As per the recommendations of the National Knowledge Commission, India needs to establish 1,500 universities to take its GER to even 15 per cent. So, not only is the government establishing new universities, colleges and polytechnics; it is also encouraging large-scale private participation in expanding the higher education capacity.

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which would permit the person to retain his/her citizenship of another country and at the same time be a tenured or non-tenured faculty of the university academia. The government commits to provide a high quality life within the environs of the university campus with access to schooling, health, leisure, entertainment and residential facilities to stimulate faculty and student. Recognising the fact that talent tends to cluster, networks of eminent persons from the Indian diaspora working in universities abroad or involved in research establishments in industry shall be formed to act as facilitators for the sourcing of worldwide talent for appointment to the universities. The government shall ensure suitable facilitation for immigration of persons desirous of working in the national universities. The government shall seek the assistance of pre-eminent persons whether scientists, researchers or academicians with the stature and eminence worldwide, such as Nobel Laureates etc., to act as anchors to guide, promote and lead the university to achieve world-class standards.

To ensure that quality does not suffer during this race to create and expand capacity, it is important that India’s higher education system quickly finds good quality, experienced teachers. By the end of Tenth Five Year Plan, India had a strength of 4.92 lakh faculty to teach 140 lakh students, which was woefully short of the requirement. According to Ernst & Young EDGE 2011 report, there is a need for continued focus on faculty augmentation initiatives. The report says that faculty appointment for higher education has grown at a slower pace than enrolments—2.28 per cent from 2005 to 2009, as against 6.2 per cent (student enrolment) in the same period. As there is a huge faculty crunch even in the existMarch 2012 EduTech

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Brain Gain

“Perception (some reality) of poor research standards and lack of good PhD students act as blocks stopping top US professors from going to India” Arogyaswamy Paulraj Professor Emeritus, Stanford University

ing HEIs, including highly reputed ones like the IITs, IIMs and central universities, with nearly 21-35 per cent of the posts lying vacant, it would be that much more difficult to get quality faculty for the new institutes. In such a scenario, the only way to quickly get readymade, trained faculty is to bring back India-born professors abroad.

Counting the Lost Sheep “Right now, India is most attractive. Salaries have increased considerably. Also, there are way too many openings and the demand for good teachers is surpassing the supply” Kishore Kulkarni Professor of Economics, Metropolitan State College of Denver

“I spend 80 per cent of my time on research and my belief is that such an approach would be suicidal in an Indian university in terms of career progression” Raj Grewal Irving and Irene Bard Professor of Marketing, Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University

“Today there is much more readiness among (global) Indians to come back” Ashok Jhunjhunwala Professor, Electronics and TelecommunIcations Department, IIT Madras

“I have not seriously considered coming back for good as I do not see in India the combination of research environment and monetary compensation that is currently available in the US” Srinivas Palanki Professor and Chair, Dept of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of South Alabama

EduTech March 2012

In fact, some of the best Indian teachers do not teach in India. They teach at the universities in the US, UK and various other developed nations. That is mainly because the country failed to recognise and nurture talent. Take the case of Pune-born Dr Thomas Kailath, for instance, the Hitachi America Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, Stanford University. The government awarded a Padma Bhushan in 2009 for his contribution to science and engineering, but when he applied to IIT Kanpur, after his doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961, he did not even get a positive reply. “My memory is a bit hazy about those days. But I either got a rejection letter or no reply at all. So I joined Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Later, within 18 months of my PhD, Stanford offered me associate professorship,” says Kailath. Not just Kailath, but there are thousands of cases where India’s loss became the gain of United States or other nations where knowledge was nurtured. Most of them went there for postgraduate studies and then stayed on as they got lucrative offers. According to American Universities Admission Programme, a global consulting firm, in 1997-98, a staggering 4,092 Indian professors were teaching in the US universities. Currently, in Pennsylvania State University alone, the number of Indian professors is over 100, which was revealed at an India summit held there recently. If this figure is extrapolated, the number of Indian academics in the US can run into several thousands, considering that the US has around 6,000 HEIs. Similarly, UK, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand also have a large number of Indian

Brain Gain

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Now Home is where the Yuan is Lure them Back the China Way with pay packages and facilities comparable to the best universities around the world

hina is mounting a huge campaign to lure its brightest minds back home. Many universities in that country are hiring Chinese faculty from Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and other elite universities overseas. In 2008, China launched the Thousand Talents Programme, offering top scientists grants of one million Yuan (about $1,46,000), fat salaries and generous lab funding. The goal of China is to become an innovation powerhouse. For that, it requires seasoned researcher scientists, who might produce technological

China has lured academics from abroad with high salaries, subsidised housing and long-term research grants

breakthroughs and build key research programmes. To get them, Chinese HEIs are tempting their academics abroad with salaries comparable to the US, subsidised housing and long-term grants, allowing them wider latitude to conduct truly innovative research. The strategy seems to be working. A decade ago, only one in 100 leading Chinese scientists in the US would have considered returning, says a top Chinese professor, who returned from a leading US University. Today half would, according to him. Source: Businessweek

academics. While a significant number of them are interested in coming back, there are many who never thought of returning. Dr Rajdeep Grewal, Irving and Irene Bard Professor of Marketing, Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University is among the latter.

Research: The Grey Area “I spend 80 per cent of my time on research and my belief is that such an approach would be suicidal in an Indian university in terms of career progression,” says Prof Grewal, who is a visiting faculty at ISB. He feels that for business schools, universities in India are not ‘there’ in terms of infrastructure and a culture that values research. Unlike Grewal, Dr Nirmalya Kumar, Professor of Marketing, Director of Centre for Marketing and Codirector of Aditya V Birla India Centre at London Business School has thought about returning to India. However, he cannot. “There is no institution other than ISB in India for research in my area and ISB is in Hyderabad, where I do not wish to live for personal reasons. Other business schools do not have a research cohort with whom I would be able to interact,” he says. This makes it amply clear that returnees are willing to change their location of work, but not their research goals. “Top-quality faculty members need

assurance that they will find a strong research supportive environment, where research clearly is the most important aspect of their performance. It also includes easy access to all the databases they use, strong IT capability, support like statistics, research assistants and access to companies,” says Rangnekar. However, most HEIs in India are focussed on teaching, not on research. Also, our research standards are not yet globally competitive. “Perception (some reality) of poor research standards and lack of good PhD students act as blocks stopping top US professors from going to India,” says Dr Arogyaswami Paulraj, Professor Emeritus, Electrical Engineering Department, Stanford University. Recognising this problem, GoI has begun increasing research grants for public HEIs. For instance, IIM Calcutta recently got a research grant of Rs 20 crore to conduct research in global finance markets and to upgrade its financial research and trading laboratory to support advanced applied research.

Money Still Matters Another key concern is that compensation package in Indian HEIs does not correspond to the salary levels globally. Most public institutes, including IIMs and IITs, pay as per UGC or AICTE scales which remain fixed for 10 years and do not correspond to March 2012 EduTech

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Brain Gain

the changing market realities. While the Sixth Pay Commission has narrowed the gap between academic and industry salaries, it is still a long way from global standards. It is important to make salary levels attractive for the brightest to return. “I have not seriously considered coming back for good as I do not see in India the combination of research environment and monetary compensation that is currently available in the US,” says Dr Srinivas Palanki, Professor and Chair, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of South Alabama. Universities in the US pay faculty their market value driven by a resume, just like private sector in India does. “If I look at the business model adopted by multinationals and IT companies in India, clearly an enhanced compensation model that is comparable to western countries would help attract top-quality professors to India. For instance, if you work in IBM USA and want to work for IBM India, you can get roughly 70 per cent of your US pay in India. Furthermore, it is quite likely that you would get an enhanced managerial responsibility. Clearly, higher pay has to be tied to a higher level of performance,” says Palanki. The only HEI in India which is known to follow this model of faculty compensation is ISB, Hyderabad. “We peg our salaries with international standards on a purchasing power parity basis. In absolute terms, we pay roughly around 60 per cent of global salaries,” says Rangnekar. A typical B-School in the US offers salaries ranging from $80,000 to 120,000 per annum. Paulraj says, “We cannot fix compensation easily. But for short-term we should offer US compensation. China has done this.” (See Box on pg 21) according to Chatterjee, even Pakistan has begun giving market salaries to attract its professors from the US. “It is only a matter of time before India too goes the same route,” he says.

Is the Shine Real? Other than monetary compensation and research environment, some of the other key concerns seem to be quality of life (housing and hygiene), peer group, academic freedom and non-academic pressures (too much of teaching burden, compulsion to sit on various committees, etc). Family pressures also play an important part. According to R Dandapani, Dean and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, “Mostly professors who have taught in the USA for a while will have established families with grown up children. It will then be hard to move the entire family.”

EduTech March 2012

Testing Waters in Homeland Visiting faculty can be a short-term solution to quality professorship with benefits for both, the Indian professors abroad and HEIs

any India-born professors prefer to come down as visiting faculty, rather than return lock, stock and barrel. Dr Raghu Murtugudde, Professor, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, University of Maryland, is among them. “I visit at least four times a year to impart environmental education and I love it. So brain gain doesn’t necessarily mean coming back,” he says. His focus has mostly been on giving talks to high school and college students especially in rural areas. Murtugudde has also given talks and conducted short/full courses at places like IISc, Bangalore, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune and Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services. Similarly, Prof Srinivas Palanki of University of South Alabama has been visiting India for the past two years to conduct teaching workshops as part of an initiative called ‘Indo US Collaboration for Engineering Education’. From 1985 to 1990, Professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver, Dr Kishore Kulkarni, worked three months in a year with the National Institute of Bank Management at Pune. Even today, he is a visiting faculty at ICFAI Business School, Pune and School of Communication and Management Studies, Kochi. Every year, he also spends a week each at Bhavan’s College and at Unity College, Pune. They are among a large number of academics from abroad who come and teach for a semester or two at all major Indian HEIs like IITs, I2IT and IIIT, Bangalore, which invite them during their sabbatical year. Every year, ISB alone attracts over a 100 visiting faculty who spend a term teaching and researching at the school. “When faculty from abroad spends their sabbatical in India, it allows them to test the waters. Similarly, the institution also gets the

Brain Gain

Good option: Those who do not want to return for good or are unsure, try the part-time teaching route opportunity to gauge whether the faculty member would be a good fit and would adjust to Indian circumstances. There is value in such an arrangement for both the parties through exchange of ideas that takes place during the period even if the faculty member does not return to India for good,” says Prof Dinesh Mehta of Colorado School of Mines. Those who cannot make the trip, use distant mode of teaching. For instance, the alumni of College of Engineering, Pune, who are in faculty positions in the US, help the institute by taking courses through video-conferencing. Most tenured/senior professors abroad have ties with the local industry or are part of multiyear research programmes and cannot afford long absences. On top of it, if they have to take huge pay-cuts, it becomes more difficult. “I think India should focus on short visits from prominent US professors”, says Dr Arogyaswami Paulraj, Professor Emeritus, Stanford, who is involved with many IITs and research centres and visits India often. Most good institutions pay for stay and travel within India apart from a small honorarium to visiting faculty from abroad. “I was inviting myself to every place till a couple of years ago but now they have money to invite me,” says Murtugudde. He says he has been invited more times to China than to India! A grouse that Indian HEIs voice against some visiting faculty is that they recycle whatever they teach in the US. That is, no insights relevant to India are provided. Perhaps, Indian HEIs can demand better inputs when they begin offering better remuneration and planning such visits.

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Even if they decide to move, spouse’s career and children’s schooling often become deal-breakers, particularly in non-metro institutions. “We lose some of the senior people we aim for as global quality education for their children is their top priority. Career for spouses is another important issue affecting their decision,” says Rangnekar. Too much government intervention and rigid processes are also dampeners. “There is as much interest in returning to India in the academic community as there is among entrepreneurs. But what is holding top faculty back is the Indian bureaucracy and the government control of education,” says Vivek Wadhwa, Professor of Duke University, and Researcher at Harvard Law School, who conducted a study of returning Indians and Chinese. According to him, if the Indian government removed the shackles and allowed foreign institutions to compete with local institutions, it would see a flood of returnees. It is the academic freedom at the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad that has attracted so many professors who have taught abroad earlier. “Our professors have freedom to choose their research areas, course design and participation in institutional processes and have flexibility in teaching methodology and evaluation of students,” says Dr Rajeev Sangal, Director, IIIT Hyderabad. Curriculum at the institute is research oriented even at undergraduate level and colleagues and students are available in diverse areas, enabling faculty to form research groups for joint work. Apart from a strong peer group locally, the faculty also wants easy access to global researchers. “Every year several top global professors visit ISB as part of the academic conferences we host,” says Rangnekar. The business school is among the few HEIs in the country which encourage faculty to work on collaborative research projects with peers from around the world. “When people doing research in India see that good work done here has recognition abroad, they gain confidence. We followed a simple rule: all senior people must be recognised among their peers worldwide for the work they have done at Tata Research Development and Design Centre (TRDDC). People were happy when they started getting invited to give talks at conferences; to join programme committees; and to be reviewers for research papers,” says Dr Mathai Joseph, former executive director of TRDDC, who returned after teaching for 12 years at the University of Warwick.

Magnetic Attraction While there is interest in returning, the real challenge for India will be attracting and retaining strong March 2012 EduTech

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Brain Gain

faculty. It is for this that IIT Kharagpur is planning to appoint ‘magnet’ faculty. “A bright faculty acts like a queen bee and helps in attracting a team of other faculty and researchers to him/her,” says Dr Damodar Acharya, Director of IIT Kharagpur. The institute is considering recruitment of such faculty through invitation from other countries, with an initial research grant of around Rs 10 crore, good working space, support of three to four PhD students and one to two post-doctoral fellows and furnished accommodation. While many HEIs provide faculty housing on campus, IIT Gandhinagar offers them hassle-free service apartments. “We provide a conducive environment where they do not feel burdened with too much teaching,” says Jain. A few HEIs like ISB encourage their faculty to publish in the top-tier academic journals. ISB also follows the ‘tenure-track system’ of faculty evaluation and provides the necessary research budgets and assistance. “The fact that we do all of this with a

than average remuneration, research support in the form of assistants, funding, database access, etc., and flexible working conditions like working from home,” says Prof S Sriram, Executive Director, Great Lakes Institute of Management. While the salaries are limited to a government scale in public institutions, some like IITs, IIMs and IIITs are raising private funds to be able to offer their faculty with liberal research grants and various other incentives. For instance, IIM Kozhikode offers Rs 10 lakh for the best research paper.

National Gain Plan The Union Government has announced a slew of fellowship programmes, aimed at bringing back scientists and researchers of Indian origin. These programmes include Ramalingaswami Re-entry Fellowship and Ramanujan Fellowship Programme for brilliant Indian scientists and engineers from all over the world to take up research positions at any of the scientific institutions and universities in India. Both are given for a five-year-duration, including a fellowship of Rs 75,000 per month and a contingent research grant of Rs 5 lakh per year. The former also includes a house rent allowance of Rs 7,500 per month. To augment research and teaching resources of universities, UGC has introduced ‘Operation Faculty Recharge’, where 1,000 highly talented candidates would be inducted into universities across the country over the next five years after a global competitive selection based on their research work and publications. Final selection of overseas candidates would be made based on a video-conference interview and personal appearance. Apart from the usual emoluments and benefits, these faculty members will be given funding for their research project and a start-up grant to set up the laboratory facilities. Through its scheme Encore, UGC is targeting NRIs/ PIOs working in overseas academic, research and business organisations to enhance faculty resources of universities, stimulate global quality research and enrich the academic milieu at universities. Adjunct faculty or scholars in residence will get Rs 1 lakh contingency grant per annum in addition to a salary of Rs 80,000 per month, office and accommodation. The government is also thinking of sharing revenue from intellectual property with the researchers, a viable method for ‘brain gain’.

The Union Government has announced a slew of fellowship programmes, aimed at bringing back scientists and researchers of Indian origin quality that is directly comparable with some of the best schools in the world makes it an attractive proposition for top-notch global faculty who are looking to move to India,” says Rangnekar. While ISB funds exploratory visits of prospective faculty, IIIT Hyderabad is also planning to pay for travel so that Indian faculty abroad can visit its campus before deciding to join it. Even the more conservative public HEIs like IIMs and IITs have begun advertising faculty positions in the journals of various academic associations in the US. Some like IIT Kharagpur use their worldwide alumni network, particularly the one amongst the academia, to identify bright candidates abroad. “We usually reach out to our visiting faculty and those who are known to my colleagues with offers of 50 to 100 per cent more

EduTech March 2012

Brain Gain

Future Hub of Intellectuals

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“ There is as much interest in returning

According to Ernst & Young EDGE to India in the academic community 2011 report, ‘40 million by 2020: Preas there is among entrepreneurs. But paring for a new paradigm in Indian what is holding top faculty back is the higher education’, there exists a need Indian bureaucracy and the for developing international centres government control of education” of excellence (CoEs) to attract stuVivek Wadhwa dents and faculty. The Nalanda UniDirector of Research, Centre for Entrepreneurship and Research versity and the 14 innovation univerCommercialisation, Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University sities among others are part of an effort by GoI to set up such CoEs which aim to attract the best students and faculty from across the globe. Among the private HEIs, Amity is setting up CoEs across domains. “These CoEs provided an excellent platform for over 30 Indian professors based abroad to join us and S Sriram actively focus on their area of acaExecutive Director, Great Lakes demic interest,” says Dr Gurinder Institute of Management Singh, Pro Vice Chancellor, Amity University. Dr Dinesh Mehta, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer “While there is a lack of comprehensive framework Science, Colorado School of Mines, in attracting eminent academicians of Indian origin, has also considered coming back. “But I do not realHEIs of high repute have put in place mechanisms ly understand how higher education works in India. of their own to attract and collaborate with them,” What kind of politics one has to deal with, what type says Dr TLS Bhaskar, an independent researcher. of lifestyle is possible with the salary one would Interest in India is on the rise and all the global receive at an HEI, how much emphasis is there on socio-economic conditions are ripe for India-born research in addition to teaching, what resources are academics to return in large numbers. As of today, available for research, etc.,” he says. only a handful of islands of excellence like IITs, IIMs It is to clear such doubts that Dr Jain makes preand IIITs are taking advantage of this opportunity. sentations to Indian graduate students and postRest of Indian HEIs need to get their act together if doctoral fellows in numerous universities worldthey too want to grab the best brains among wide about the exciting opportunities IIT the returnees. Gandhinagar offers to faculty. He has, so far, held Will the academics of Indian origin, either by such meetings at Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford returning or visiting, transform the quality of higher and Caltech at the US; EPFL in Switzerland and education in India, even while it contemplates an NUS and NTU in Singapore among others. “It exponential growth in quantity? Will the HEIs capaenables potential faculty to ask questions and clarify ble of wooing Indian academics abroad succeed in their doubts about opportunities that we offer,” raising their numbers in India? he says. It is yet early to say, but a beginning has been These opportunities are not limited to enhanced made. Perhaps some tweaking of policies and procemonetary benefits alone, but include those of selfdures on the part of the government and revamping esteem and self-actualisation as well. “Indian HEIs of higher education system in the country will hascan offer ‘grand challenges’—both societal and techten the process. nical—to researchers. In a country like ours, there is a chance for research to connect with society and work on larger social problems, thereby seeing Also read: fruition of one’s work beyond publications,” Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs newsletter says Sangal. http://bit.ly/zX7iOI So far, institutions like IITs and IISc have attractMHRD’s page for NRIs/PIOs ed back many good US PhDs of Indian origin. http://bit.ly/zrrMLZ

“We usually reach out to our visiting faculty and those who are known to my colleagues”

March 2012 EduTech

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Rangan Banerjee

Brain Gain

Dean, Research & Development, IIT Bombay

EduTechâ&#x20AC;&#x192; March 2012

Brain Gain

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Bringing Back Alumni Dr Rangan Banerjee, Dean of Research and Development, IIT-B tells EDU about the efforts his institute is making to bring back good Indian professors from foreign shores

by Jiten Gandhi

IIT-B is among the few institutions in India making sustained efforts to bring back Indian professors from abroad. How does it go about doing so? We have a global ‘faculty alumni network’, which is mainly a network of our alumni in faculty positions abroad, especially in the US. It helps us identify people considering returning to India. However, we are very careful while recruiting, as a lot of people who want to come back are not good enough. Just because somebody has a foreign degree does not automatically qualify them as good teachers and researchers. We have an alumni meet in the US once a year where our administrators meet those who are desirous of returning, face to face. Interviews are also conducted through video-conferencing and appointment letters are given directly to the bright and deserving. Now nearly half of the people joining us as faculty have come from the US. We find that relocation is best done early on in one’s career – one or two years after PhD. Lateral entries are difficult as by then people usually have established an infrastructure for their work. What is IIT-B doing to make its research environment, systems and processes more conducive to inspire Indian professors abroad to come back and work with it? The research environment at IIT-B is very good for self-motivated people. As long as the

faculty members fulfil their basic teaching responsibilities, they have the freedom and flexibility to decide on the areas they want to research in and carry on their work as they choose to. We also provide research staff to support the faculty. Further, they can have good quality PhD and masters students as assistants and an opportunity of interacting with bright young minds. We give Rs 10 lakh as seed grant, a start-up research grant given even before writing of the research proposal. In case the research involves buying equipment, the seed grant goes up to Rs 20 lakh. Additionally, all the administrative and accounts support is provided online, in order to reduce doing things ad hoc. The institute also takes care of the patenting cost, thus providing protection of intellectual property (IP). Apart from generating funds from the government and the industry by enhancing industry links, the institute is also funding large research infrastructure. We are also trying to articulate a larger vision and organise faculty into groups working on themes like healthcare, climate, aerospace, etc., wherein their collective research will have greater impact on society. Being part of something like this is also very attractive for faculty wanting to join us.

How do you ensure that the monetary compensation is competitive? We give joining bonuses, supported by our alumni, which is Rs 1 lakh per year for the first three years as a top-up to the salary. The salary itself can be considered double/treble of the actual cash in hand, considering the cost to the institute as the faculty gets free housing, schooling for their children and medical facilities. The quality of life on the campus is also very good. The institute has excellent international links, and the faculty often get stints in universities abroad. We have very liberal rules for consulting, whereby the faculty gets to keep 70 per cent of the money they generate from it. Similarly, inventors of products/processes which are commercialised get 70 per cent of the licensing revenue. In fact, the income of some of our faculty from consulting and licensing runs into several crores! March 2012 EduTech

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Vivek Bhandari

Former director, IRMA

EduTechâ&#x20AC;&#x192; March 2012

Brain Gain

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Drawn by India in Transition Independent researcher and former director of IRMA, Dr Vivek Bhandari tells EDU what prompted him to give up his tenured professorship in the US and return to India

by subhojit paul

You returned after teaching in the US for around 10 years, despite being a tenured professor. What made you come back? I thoroughly enjoyed working as a tenured professor in Amherst, Massachusetts. However, partly because of the nature of my discipline (modern Indian history) and broader academic engagements (political theory, institutional economics, etc.,), I strongly felt the urge to live in India, a country in the throes of a tectonic transition. I was barely 36 years old when I was offered the opportunity to serve as director and professor at one of India’s innovative premier academic institutes, IRMA. This was a major break and I felt that it was time to take the plunge. Another more personal reason for my moving to India and taking up the IRMA offer was that I was always drawn to public service. My new role at IRMA would, I knew, give me opportunities to engage with issues of development and social justice in India in ways that were not possible in the US. How difficult was the decision to relocate to India? How did you handle it? Once I was offered the directorship, I was aware that the transition was likely to be difficult, so I negotiated a two-year lien on my job in the US. This protected my tenured position there. My time in the US (15 years) was transformative in extraordinary ways and a part of me continues

to care deeply for all that I left behind. For these reasons, the decision to move back to India was not easy. However, it made sense given my desire to work in India, and to reconnect with family and friends. Also, my wife and I were conscious that our kids, three and six years old when we made the decision to return to India, would handle the transition well.

Considering that the monetary compensation may not have been at par, what was so attractive about the IRMA offer? The pay packet was only a fraction of what I got in the US. But money was never the deciding factor. It was the unique work profile that attracted me. After Dr Varghese Kurien’s departure, IRMA went through a very difficult phase. It had lost many of its professors and was also grappling with questions of unclear identity in the post-liberalisation era. That meant that I could take an established name, give it a new identity and a context in the changed scenario. This prospect of re-visioning and creating a strategy for IRMA seemed a very exciting responsibility to me. Also, the fact that I got promoted to full professor at IRMA helped make the job more attractive and made up for the fact that I was leaving a tenured position in the US. Are you happy with your decision to return? What were the major challenges? Overall, I am very happy to move to India. My most difficult challenges came in the workplace. By and large, academic institutions in India seem to be top heavy in their governance, and less enabling for faculty than their American counterparts. Rules like attendance for faculty, a draconian system of ‘approvals’ by the director, etc., are manifestations of this, which made my adjustment difficult. For the first year, in my role as IRMA’s director, I found it difficult to ‘enforce’ the rules and systems that the institute had normalised over the years. This was largely because I was reluctant to apply the rules that did not make sense to me, or worse, I found unacceptable as a professional academic. This changed over time of course, primarily because we were able to evolve a culture of mutual trust and openness. March 2012 EduTech

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Prashant Kale

Brain Gain

Assistant Professor, Wharton School

EduTechâ&#x20AC;&#x192; March 2012

Brain Gain

cover story

The Right Ambience

Dr Prashant Kale, Associate Professor of Strategic Management, Jones School of Business, Rice University and Fellow, Mack Centre for Technology and Innovation, Wharton School, gives tips to attract NRI professors

Have you ever thought of coming back to India for good and teaching here? I thought about it very seriously in 2006. ISB had even made an offer. I asked IIM Ahmedabad not to make any offer, as the remuneration they were offering was pathetic—it was like they were asking me to work almost for free. In case of ISB, it expects senior faculty to participate in institution building as it is a growing business school. I could not devote that kind of time at that juncture and therefore could not take it up. Q: What do academics, desirous of returning, look for? We academics value two things—freedom and flexibility to do our work and the second is remuneration, which is not as important as the first, but important enough. Remuneration in the education sector in India has not kept pace with the private sector. If private sector salaries have grown by 300 per cent in the last few years, then academic salaries should go up by at least 100 to 200 per cent. That has not happened. Not only is the remuneration poor, but even institutes like IIM-A do not come close in terms of freedom and flexibility. Typical faculty in a business school in the US has to teach 80-100 hours in a year. I finish my teaching in 14-16 days and rest of the year I have all the freedom to do what I want. Most business schools in India do not offer an environment for research. When faculty members are not paid enough, they usually end

up doing a lot of other activities to earn extra money. This leaves them little time to do research. Also, there are too many pressures on faculty’s time— teaching, consulting and service activities like sitting on various committees. In the US, faculty is not expected to do all that.

What else would it take for top-notch professors like you to return and teach? Right kind of peer group working on similar areas and availability of research assistants are also important considerations. We are used to working in the academic research model, writing on narrow areas in research magazines. Sometimes it takes three-five years for a paper to be accepted. To become better at it, you have to be a part of the global ecosystem. B-schools in India do not have these networking opportunities to the same degree. What stops good Indian professors abroad from coming back? Indian students are very bright and it is fun to teach them. But the system is rigidly bureaucratic and decisions don’t get made easily, which is a major deterrent. Too many permissions are required to get anything done. For instance, to start a new course, it has to go through three different committees. And those taking the decisions quite often know little of your field. It is a painful process Also, there is no research environment in Indian HEIs. There is also a lot of government interference in institutes like the IIMs. Because of the Right to Information Act, many professors I know are scared of taking any decision, as they are busy covering their backs. What is your advice to Indian HEIs hoping to bring back Indian professors from abroad? Indian HEIs pay too much attention to dissemination of knowledge, but do not have the same support and culture for creation of knowledge. It is important to focus on knowledge creation through right environment and support for research. Which means processes should be less rigid and cumbersome. It is also critical to pay teachers more to make India attractive. March 2012 EduTech

campus

Library

Todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s libraries not only retain their distinctive flavours of yore, but have now evolved into intellectual hubs offering much more to the academic community, what with technological evolution adding to its considerable treasure trove by Teja Lele Desai 32

EduTechâ&#x20AC;&#x192; March 2012

courtesy library picture amity

learning outside the formal academic sphere. It remains the only social space where learning happens with a fine balance between the non-academic and academic environment,” says Parul Mittal, architect and partner in Gurgaon-based Dada & Partners. The Information Age has left students spoilt for choice—classrooms are WiFi or allow access to the internet; labs are often open till late night and there’s a plethora of information up for the taking. With technology making it possible to get information at the click of a button (never mind its veracity), has the library received a death sentence? Mittal feels the library still is the heart of any campus. “The internet may be an March 2012 EduTech

By raj verma

or centuries, libraries have been the place to go in search of information. The traditional stereotype brings to mind the high ceiling, Victorian era relics, with beams of sunlight playing through apertures on rows upon rows of neatly stacked books, tables with students clustered around them and a stern librarian, bun in place, going “shhhhhh…”. Conventionally, libraries have housed huge collections of the written word. But today a library is often home to digital resources, and services. On campus, libraries have undergone a sea change to keep pace with changing technology. Academic libraries these days often house huge collections of print, audio, and visual materials in numerous formats—maps, prints, documents, microform (microfilm/microfiche), CDs, DVDs, e-books, audio-books and other electronic resources. The revolution on the landscape of learning and teaching may have meant modifications, but the academic library retains its distinctiveness as a place for communal study and research. “You may call it the intellectual living room, as the library retains its power to draw seekers of knowledge under a single roof, encouraging chance interactions crucial to

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important tool for research, but can’t replace the library for its role as a preserver of credible information and intellectual energy. The internet excludes the critical component of human interaction and its significant role in the exchange of ideas and information.” “Contrary to reports on the ‘death of the library’, this institution is now bigger and more powerful than ever and has changed with times, responding to the requirement of greater social interaction with a multitude of activities incorporated under one roof,” she says.

Dr Ajay Rana, Director, Amity Technical Placement Cell, agrees. “In addition to acting as a peaceful, serene place ideal for self-learning and ideating, libraries now act as a common place where diverse social groups of teachers and students can mingle and interact.” Today libraries must make space to facilitate the change driven by the technological and information revolutions. Apart from stacks of books, they must also be home to the electronic media. With a modern academic library covering a range of

“Libraries facing a paradigm shift quality of those resources and whose understanding of research has often been shaped by technical expertise rather than critical questions.” The internet poses an instructional challenge that involves helping readers recognise when information is needed, locate the information, assess available sources of information, and use information skillfully and responsibly.

How do present-day libraries differ from libraries of the past? Libraries today are confronting a paradigm shift involving intentional learning. This frees us from a schoolwork approach to learning and from mere trafficking of information. The challenge before us is to align library space design with the transformational character of intentional learning.

What do designers and architects need to keep in mind when designing library space?

Scott Bennett, Yale University Librarian Emeritus, provides library space planning consulting services for universities and colleges. He speaks to EDU on how libraries have changed over the years, how they can harness technology, and what architects need to keep in mind when designing a library space Has the internet as a source for information affected the library on campus? The internet has made it more easy than ever before to locate information. The ‘fire hose’ supply of information now available challenges us to rethink the primary responsibility of academic libraries. Are we, as in the past, service organisations supplying information, or must we now become agencies of instruction? An academic librarian observed, “We face the challenge of internet-savvy students whose ease of using online resources is not matched with critical judgment about the

EduTech March 2012

The fundamental design challenge is designing for learning. Our past planning and design practice favours designing for service (e.g., reference and circulation services) and for the shelving of library materials. These functions must still be accommodated, but they can no longer be our primary design purpose. Design must now be primarily concerned with learning.

How can libraries respond to changes in technology? Librarians need to understand the character of learning outside the classroom—intentional learning (to use the term of educational theorists)—and to design space that fosters such learning. We also need to make the paradigm shift today’s digital environment requires. The chief obstacles to change lie in our conception of readers as information consumers; in our allegiance to library operations as the drivers of library design; and in the choice made between foundational and non-foundational views of knowledge.

Library

activities (such as information gathering, individual and group study, research and reference work, discussions and browsing), it is essential that the design is multifunctional. “Access to knowledge and information may be very easy with the emergence and integration of information technology, but the library on any campus is still a contemplative oasis,” says architect Sanjay Mohe, who was part of the team that designed the award-winning library at IISc, Bangalore. “The library is the only centralised location where emerging information technol-

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ogy can be combined with traditional knowledge resources in a user-focussed environment,” he adds. Clearly, the spread of technology has, instead of undermining the library’s importance, made it an even more significant spot on campus—it is one place that allows access to the internet for all. A college library—often seen as a symbol of college pride— functions as a central cultural centre and plays a huge role in community building by mixing serious academic work with fun events.

The Design Challenge

How important is collaboration with the college administration and the end users (the students)? College administrators traditionally view libraries as service organisations, not least because that has been the way librarians have presented their work to their communities. Libraries are thought to ‘support’ the college’s mission. This separates libraries from those on campus who ‘enact’ the college’s learning mission— principally classroom faculty, and also the students. The challenge before academic librarians is to rethink their mission, to become enactors rather than supporters of mission, to become more of instructors and less of service and support providers. Once librarians have rethought their own professional identities, they will have to ensure that college administrators and classroom faculty understand this change in their self-perception, and engage them not as librarians but as collaborators in the enactment of the college’s mission.

With group study acquiring greater importance these days, how can spaces be created in libraries to facilitate this? A space for group study responds to students’ preference for ‘learning by doing’ and other active learning behaviours. It is not designed to support the delivery of one or another library service; it is space where students are neither served nor taught, but where they take command of their own learning. Designing spaces for group study is easy. The difficult thing is to design spaces for a large set of other important intentional learning behaviours.

Any particular library that comes to mind when it comes to the perfect library design? Not yet. There have been some remarkable buildings, such as the Lied Library at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. But we have less than 15 years of experience in building and planning academic libraries for learning; we are still very much in the discovery and learning mode.

What goes into library design? And how does it differ from other spaces on a campus? According to the Association of College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Standards for College Libraries 2000 Edition, “A library facility should be well planned; it should provide secure and adequate space, conducive to study and research with suitable environmental conditions for its services, personnel, resources, and collections.” “The evolving role of libraries needs to be kept in mind when designing one. A library is not merely a study space anymore, rather it is a vibrant centre for the meeting of minds and for activities that support and encourage such interactions. It needs to be the heart of our new knowledge campus and, for that, it needs to attract a knowledge seeker through a variety of spaces and activities. It is important to keep in mind the ethos of such a knowledge seeker—the kind of spaces that inspire him/her and promote learning, collaboration and interaction,” Mittal says. On campuses that serve several faculties, a library must merge knowledge across disciplines to create a sense of academics. Designers must create a space with a positive balance between space and learning. Modern academic libraries must also include flexible shelving arrangements to house growing collections, allow for easy movement and accessibility and accommodate technological tools. Some modern libraries are also implementing wireless communications technologies. “In the past, expanding collections reduced user space, but now technology has enriched user space. The use of electronic databases, digitised formats, and interactive media, to an extent, has fostered a shift from independent study to interactive learning,” Mohe says. Amity University houses one central and 49 departmental libraries that work like Integrated Knowledge Resource Centres—they house over 1.25 lakh books, periodicals, references, national and international journals. The library also allows access to more than 17, 000 online journals. “Libraries act as a breeding ground for innovative ideas and self-learning. It is extremely important to refurbish and revamp libraries in tandem with rapidly changing technology. All our libraries abound with e-books and e-journals that can be used simultaneously by multiple users,” Rana says. Scott Bennett, Yale University Librarian Emeritus, says a new vision is needed “to realise the potential of the physical library building and to create the library of the future”. In Libraries Designed for Learning, Bennett, who provides library space March 2012 EduTech

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Library

planning consulting services, questions whether the goal of libraries today might more appropriately be described as “supporting collaborative learning by which students turn information into knowledge and sometimes into wisdom”. Mittal’s DADA & Partners, a multidisciplinary design firm offering architecture, urban design and planning services, recently proposed the prize-winning master plan for the new 20-acre campus of School of Planning and Architecture (SPA) in Vasant Kunj, New Delhi. Speaking about the library being planned at the new SPA campus, Mittal says the campus is geared towards a knowledge and design-centric economy. The new-age media library commons will be the hub of the campus, promoting easy flow and assimilation of information, and encouraging the concept of working where you are—be it the e-cafe or WiFi student centre lobby. “The library is open to light, landscape and the city. While the section with its staggered floor plates is open and fluid, the plan is compact and efficient. There are low, quiet spaces for individual study, and high, open areas for more casual reading and group work. The library is planned to be one of the iconic buildings on the campus,” she says The SPA library is strategically located at the seam between the lower and upper campus zones (the traditional campus core) so as to make it more accessible. The building sits at the crossroads of two important learning armatures that define the structure of the campus master plan thereby allowing maximum flow of students and faculty. “The proximity of the library to the gallery spaces, workshop and the campus commons makes for a high-energy environment that promotes learning through interaction and collaboration,” Mittal says. The JRD Tata Digital Library, IISc, has an introverted character that protects it from outside disturbances and creates a tran-

quil environment. Beyond the registration point, the library is a huge open space—inviting students to study and ideate where they like: in the courtyards, on the steps or under the trees. A water pond at the lowest point of the site adds to the quietude. “It is important to create a meditative environment to advance the learning experience. Glare-free light, a distant view of the landscape outside (to avoid visual fatigue), a dust and moisturefree environment, accessibility of books, proper classification, ease of maintenance, sound control, and security also need to be kept in mind,” Mohe says. Clearly, library design of the future calls for collaboration among all parties involved—the faculty, librarians, architects and the students. An analysis of how students learn, how faculty members teach, what students do in a library, the kind of spaces they need, and how teaching and learning patterns evolve, is essential to create a vibrant cultural centre that provides spaces for contemplation and selfstudy along with group discussions and debates. With these challenges in mind, Duke University and Dartmouth College created library task forces when expanding their libraries. “The key functions of such task forces are to ensure the broadest possible participation in library planning, so that planning does not become self-referential and concerned more with services than learning; and to establish a vision of the future of the library that is grounded less in traditional services and more in institutional mission,” Bennett says.

Evolution in Progress In present times, the library is seeing a complete de-institutionalisation in its programming. On top of the priority list is the need for appropriate spaces that suit evolving library activities. These activities range from traditional research and education to the need for libraries to serve a social function on campus.

“Library is the only centralised location where information technology can be combined with traditional knowledge resources in a user-focussed environment” —Sanjay Mohe

Founder, Mindspacearchitects

EduTech March 2012

Library

campus

“In addition to acting as a peaceful, serene place ideal for self-learning and ideating, libraries now act as social platforms” —Ajay Rana

Director, Amity Technical Placement Cell

“Much learning, and almost certainly the most effective learning, is socially situated learning. Library design has begun to respond to this fact,” Bennett says. On many college campuses, libraries have taken on a social mantle—they provide opportunities for socialising even as students go about the business of academics. With a range of activities now being catered to—cafes to grab a bite and a cup of coffee, cultural events (such as debates, quizzes, poetry readings, discussions and lectures), fun evenings, and art and nature exhibits, a college library functions as an academic community centre. In What’s Happening in the College Library, an essay for the Council on Library and Information Resources, Sam Demas writes that the Gould Library in Athenaeum, an elegant reading room and a cultural venue open to all, hosts about 65 events, involving about 2,300 participants, each year. “When the library acts as a welcoming and lively host, engaging the community in discourse and in enjoyment of the life of the mind, the community perception of the role of the library on campus begins to change,” he writes. “In addition to stacks of books, libraries today have formal and informal reading areas, gallery spaces, public assembly areas, multipurpose meeting rooms, after-class study (individual and group) rooms, media rooms, hot desks and cafes to name a few evolving activities. Many libraries also provide lookouts and spillout spaces that look to encourage reflection and contemplation,” Mittal says. Jeffrey T Gayton, in his report, Academic Libraries: Social or Communal? The Nature and Future of Academic Libraries, states that research (by Harold Shill and Shawn Tonner between 1995 and 2002) shows a major increase in the addition of nonlibrary facilities on campuses in the United States. These

include multimedia production centres (26.6%), cafés (24.9%), educational technology centres (15.6%), art galleries (15.1%) and bookstores (2.8%). At Amity, the students and faculty suggested that the libraries be equipped with small conference rooms (with a seating capacity of five to 10). “These syndicate rooms will provide the perfect setting to acquire team skills through brainstorming sessions and group discussions,” Rana says. “The trend of libraries acting as social platforms is catching on fast in India. Students from various disciplines are often part of clubs and societies (theatre, dramatics, dance, etc.) and are seen sitting, ideating, discussing and brainstorming with their groups,” he adds. John Dolan, who headed library policy at Museums Libraries and Archives Council, UK, and was assistant director learning at Birmingham City Council, famously said that libraries should no longer be seen as “places of function”, but viewed as “places of free and shared exploration and learning via all media, a democratic space wherein to free your mind”. Social functions notwithstanding, it is essential to remember that students often value the communal aspect of libraries and the conducive environment they provide for research and study. The need to strike a balance—considering the wide range of activities that take place in a library these days—is of paramount importance. A successful library is one that is thought through every aspect—consultation, design, construction, interiors, usage and expansion. Bennett sums it up: “If a library does not enhance the learning experience of students, it should be shut down.” Subscribe to the daily electronic newsletter from EDU at http://eduleaders.com/content/newsletters March 2012 EduTech

TECHNOLOGY 43 Tech TUTeS: DIY Video Lectures

By raj verma

39-44 Tech Snippet: Technology News and Tips and Tricks

The Learning Community Software platforms that facilitate group and individual learning by shankar venkatagiri, Assistant Professor, QMIS, IIM Bangalore (second of a three-part series) 38

EduTechâ&#x20AC;&#x192; March 2012

stablishing computing infrastructure on campus is the first of many steps in IT-enablement. Colleges seldom proceed further, expecting its faculty, students and staff to exploit ITâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s potential as it sees fit. This article throws light on software platforms that support rich forms of interactions among the various sections of an IT-enabled campus community. Chief among these are learning management systems (LMS) and lecture capture systems (LCS). Oftentimes, students use the campus network or a personal broadband connection to browse for online videos to supplement their understanding of key

Enabling Institutions with IT

Tech Snippet | Drive

Google to launch Drive cloud storage service Google is looking to launch its own cloud storage service in the near future, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. The new cloud service will be called Google Drive, and will be geared towards easy access across multiple types of portable and desktop devices. Google Drive, taking on Dropbox, Amazon S3, and Apple iCloud, will reportedly allow storage of photos, documents and videos, and access via any web-connected device. Sharing files will also be easy, with users able to pass on a link to the file via email. Drive is expected to be a free

topics. The Khan Academy (see http:// www.khanacademy.org/) hosts a goldmine of engaging videos on subjects ranging from mathematics to art history offering immense relief to students. Despite its immense instructional power, the video medium is underutilised by teachers. Instead of just consuming videos, a good teacher can begin to produce videos. By distributing them to students in advance, the classroom interactions can be made more impactful. The second half of this article details my own experience with developing instructional videos for an MBA-level statistics course, and showcases student reactions to the exercise.

Learning Management Systems Even at mature IT-enabled institutions, faculty tend to store course materials such as presentations and write-ups using folders on a ‘network drive’. These are a small fraction of the class discussion. Hyperlinks to videos played during class and any other web references (e.g. Wikipedia look-ups) are left out. Moreover, accessing the network drive from outside the campus is tricky, as it may involve setting up a VPN facility. Enlightened institutions handle this problem by operating a web-accessible learning management system such as Moodle or Sakai (Cf. http://www.oid.ucla. edu/units/tlc/tectutorials/tecmoodle, http://

TECHNOLOGy

service, with paid premium benefits like larger storage. The idea of a Google cloud storage service has been in the works for years, with a project internally known as G Drive doing the rounds in 2007. Since that time, a lot of services have been catering to the rapidly growing demand for cloud storage, and Google was missing from the market. Google apparently hopes to compete with DropBox and other mobile-accessible cloud storage services, by offering much cheaper paid storage, leveraging its massive server farms. Integration with Google Docs is of course, expected.

Comparing two populations There are many occasions in business, when two populations have to be compared. For example, you may want to contrast the efficiency of two different teams with fixing bugs in their software. Or consider the case when two varieties of wine are sampled by the same set of tasters. The question arises whether we are comparing apples to apples, or perhaps apples to oranges. This session extends the single population hypothesis testing framework to two populations. We will also compare their variances using a new tool called the F-distribution. Preparation Textbook Chapter 10 - Hypothesis Testing Diversions Here’s a neat video explaining the concept of the p-value Here’s an excellent applet from the Java Statistical Classes site Here’s how to work with paired differences Documents Comparing two populations Skills Improvement Salary Comparison Finance vs Marketing Instructional video for the session Submit your Case Analysis Older slides (Two populations) Figure 1: Example session structure on LMS

web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2004/sakai.html). Instructors can exploit the platform’s mechanisms to structure their course, session by session (see Figure 1), and make it available to only those who have registered for the course. Students can better prepare for class by browsing to suggested websites,and/or viewing a starter slide deck. Instructors can choose to use a more advanced version of the slide deck during class. Even though the LMS platform may be free, it would be wise to engage a consultant to maintain it, either on-premises, or as a solution hosted at the vendor’s facility. A good consultant will train the faculty on the platform’s usage, and reduce their ramp-up time to become productive. Open source platforms such as Moodle and Sakai also permit modifications at the software level. If a faculty member desires a new feature, the consultant can implement it without having to seek the permission of a software vendor. LMS platforms go a long way in reducing paper consumption. Faculty and students can download articles from electronic databases subscribed by their libraries over an authorised internet connection. Business schools across the globe rely on the case method, which requires the learner to examine 15-30 pages per case. Instead of printing paper copies of the cases, an instructor can ‘go green’ and include a hyperlink to the publications on the LMS course listing. March 2012 EduTech

TECHNOLOGy

Enabling Institutions with IT

Tech Snippet | Facebook

India becomes second largest Facebook nation

In November last year, Facebook had said that India could soon become its largest market after the US and Indonesia. Facebook’s predictions have come true, as India has now toppled Indonesia from the second spot in terms of the highest number of Facebook users. According to a Forbes report, India has a total of 43,497,980 Facebook users, compared to 43,060,360 in Indonesia as on February 1, 2012. Over the past 12 months, Facebook has seen a remarkable growth in India. India had a total 16,915,900 Facebook users as on January 1, 2011. By the end of 2011,

Continuous assessment and feedback are essential for effective learning. With large class sizes, these tasks carry a significant overhead. Faculty can ill-afford this at a time when research output is also being demanded by the college’s administration.The LMS feature of an online quiz comes to the rescue. The test-setter can build a quiz online and include various question types. Students can attempt this quiz (from anywhere) by using their laptops or tablets. If desired,the LMS can randomly shuffle the questions to prevent copying. LMS quizzes of multiple choice and numerical answer items can also be automatically graded. For an effective quiz, an instructor must think through the ‘failure paths’ for a multiple-choice item, rather than to suggest meaningless alternatives. The instructor can also supply an explanation to each choice, which serves as intelligent feedback to the students once the quiz is closed. For quantitative tests, it is a good practice to ask students to record their calculations in a spreadsheet, and to upload it after the quiz is over. After a quiz is graded, the LMS emails the information securely to the participant. Once the course is done, the instructor can download a comprehensive gradesheet and decide efficiently on the grades. Scanning a typewritten essay or an answer is less tedious than having to make sense of a handwritten manuscript. An LMS like

EduTech March 2012

Facebook saw a massive 144 per cent growth and in just one year, India jumped from the sixth to the No. 2 spot according to Total Facebook Users (Global) list. Facebook user growth in Brazil is even more overwhelming. Brazil now ranks fourth in terms of the highest number of Facebook users with a growth rate of 183 per cent! The South American nation had 13,409,220 Facebook users as on February 1, 2011. In just a year the total reached to 37,907,400. The US, meanwhile, has maintained its top spot on Facebook with some 19 per cent of the total Facebook users’ share.

Moodle makes a special provision for write-ups to be passed on to a web service like Turnitin to check for plagiarism. An instructor can check if a participant has not signed in for a while, and send out a

gentle reminder. Discussions can continue outside the classroom via forum threads, allowing quieter students to participate. Synchronous chat mechanisms are supported by most LMS platforms.

Lecture Capture Systems

“An IT-enabled institution can use lecture capture systems to record classroom proceedings” —Shankar Venkatagiri

Assistant Professor, IIM Bangalore

On the higher end of sophistication, an IT-enabled institution can use ‘lecture capture systems’ to record classroom proceedings. LCS platforms such as Tegrity and Matterhorn (for a demo, see http://opencast.org/matterhorn/ producttour) faithfully capture console activity such as presentations and animations and websites browsed. The teacher-student interactions can be recorded with a video camera, whose output is attached to the instructor’s console. The LCS combines these outputs, produces a searchable object, and makes it available to the students over the campus network. Here is a remark about the utility of an LCS from an EDUCAUSE report (See http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ ELI7044.pdf ): “...lecture capture systems offer three important benefits: an alternative when students miss class; an opportunity for content review, particularly when abstruse topics are introduced or detailed procedures are performed; and content for online course development...additions to captured recordings could change the character of the lecture as students annotate and reorganise what they have heard.”

Enabling Institutions with IT

Video Learning Objects Most instructional material online is static and textual, in the form of slides and lecture notes. Video is a dynamic and effective teaching tool. A simple ‘talking head’ format can be employed to create videos that instruct (see Whatley, JE and Ahmad A ‘Using Video to Record Summary Lectures to Aid Students’ Revision; Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects, Volume 3, 2007). Contrary to notions of high production costs, a basic laptop with a good processor, adequate memory, and a good webcam can be turned

into a veritable studio. Packages such as Camtasia and Captivate use the webcam on the laptop to record talking head video, which can then be placed as an inset (see Figure 2 on pg 42). Any activity such as a slide presentation,spreadsheet manipulation, or interactions with an applet, is captured in real time. An editor that comes bundled with the software enables one to assemble the streams and create an engaging video learning object (VLO). The software exports the VLO in a web-friendly format like Flash. If the instructor consciously makes an attempt to address an individual learner, the

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result would be more effective than a straightforward captureof a live lecture, for example.

Experiment Case discussions form the pedagogical foundation for participant-centred learning at many business schools today. The method warrants considerable prior preparation by students, and emphasises interaction over exposition within the classroom. When students are pressed for time (e.g., professionals), complex cases warrant the instructor to explain the driving principles a priori, and to

Video Helps This is a collation of responses to the video series on hypothesis testing for an MBA-level statistics course for 75 part-time students (IT professionals) Q Watched one or more videos in the non-ToC format? A 63 out of 73 (86%) Watched one or more videos in the ToC format? 55 out of 73 (75%) Describe how you watched the videos. “For shorter videos (10-15 minutes long) I did it in one sitting. I would wind back to parts of video that I wanted to recap. For videos that were of 30-40 minutes long, I found it difficult to go through them in one sitting.” “The first time I was watching, the videos were in fullscreen mode, and I got a complete classroom feel. While revising for the exams, I used the ToC and the Keyword search to go back and check the topics I was not confident about.” “While commuting to work, I would use my ‘large’ screen android based phone, as I do

not carry a laptop. I would go through the entire video in one go and sometimes rewind and watch the same sections....a unique experience.”

How did you use the Table of Contents? “Was most useful during pre-exam preparations. Jumped right away at the problem solving section of the videos.” Did you discuss the videos with peers in the course? Yes: 48 out of 73 (66%) Did you open the spreadsheets referred to in the videos? Yes: 35 out of 73 (48%) Did you try the applet used in the videos? Yes: 49 out of 73 (67%) Would you prefer the instructor’s talking head

video to accompany the whole presentation? Yes: 20 out of 73 (27%) “Seeing the instructor’s face kept me more attentive!” “I liked the idea that was used in the second round of videos, where the instructor’s video was introduced only in places where it needed the viewer’s attention. At least, when I am watching the videos, my complete focus is on the data in the slide and the voice teaching me how to work on it.” “I would prefer it without a face. I am accustomed to such videos even for office training videos.” In what way did the videos help (or not help) with your exam preparations and performance? “The biggest advantage is to be able to rewind as many times as I want without being called stupid. I did that several times! I am sure it helps a lot

to people who had skipped the classes. Concepts are much easier and faster to understand in a video than by going through a book.” “The videos were pretty helpful during exam preps. I seldom opened my textbook.” “The videos helped in boosting confidence and ensuring that I don’t have to look all around the internet for similar information.” “The videos were the best tool to revise concepts the day before the exam. (Only if they were watched once earlier). The downloadable version helped with offline studies. Helped solving some problems in the exam.” “The problem solving sections helped me on how to perceive a problem. Got the funda, but tackling a problem was not easy. Seeing it solved in such detail helped a lot.” “Didn’t help much. I prefer the book.” “The videos seem to have substituted a lot of classroom March 2012 EduTech

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Enabling Institutions with IT

discussions. I would have loved it if these topics were covered in the same rigour in the classes.”

Suggest improvements to the videos going forward “Can the presentations have an option to be interactive where the viewer can also do the steps simultaneously with the presenter, particularly in the problem solving videos?” “Make them available before the topics are presented

in class.” “If the videos are accompanied by assignments which start from easy, and go up to moderate and tough levels, students would be able to apply the concepts from the videos and gauge their understanding.” “It would be better if the energy levels in the instructor’s voice is the same as what we see in class – like when he finishes deriving something and says ‘Easy?’” “If possible, give a summary

supply examples. Dedicating class time to these tasks will cut down the time for discussion. Recently, I finished teaching an MBAlevel statistics course to 75 part-time students, who were IT professionals. The pedagogy employed a mix of lectures and case discussions. The course was published on the institute’s LMS (browse to http://moodle.iimb.ernet.in/course/view. php?id=133 and click on the “Login as a guest” button). Students had to prepare for each session by going through a chapter in a textbook, which had a short but realistic case at the end. During the latter half of the course, I created a set of eight VLOs on the tricky topic of hypothesis testing. I had a twopronged agenda:to explain the material within the slides, and to solve a few examples in explicit detail. Browse to http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12727538/ HTTwoPopulations/main.html for a sample VLO. I used Camtasia software running on a bottom-priced Macbook Air equipped with an Intel Core i5 processor and 2 GB of RAM. It took a day (eight hours) to create a 43-minute video, excluding the time taken to design and construct the content. If I committed any mistakes, I simply recorded that part again and pruned those segments during editing. Some creative additions (e.g., music) were made to enhance the experience.

EduTech March 2012

at the end.” “Videos may include a recorded interaction with a student as to how that student will approach the solution to a question. The professor should then clarify/filter this approach taken by the student, and caution against the various finer points where the students can/may make mistakes.” “‘Please, please, make them downloadable.’ This was a key complaint throughout the class, and discussed on our

Figure 2: Screenshots of instructional videos with a ToC

Google group too.” “Going forward, the course can have some sort of video library, where each term, problem solving videos can be added. New students to the course can spend time looking at them and become more familiar with the problem solving parts as well.” “If the videos are meant to be supplementary material to that taught in class, they could incorporate all that is not covered in class rather than repeating it.”

Mistakes on the slide were rectified by overlaying the captured video with the correction, from within the software. Occasionally, I flagged an important concept by inserting a comment like “Make sure you got that, or rewind...” Given that I did the recordings at my residence with no special lighting or props, the videos were admittedly not of professional quality. However, the slides had a logical flow of concepts, keeping an independent learner in mind. The slides were open on the laptop throughout the recordings, except when an applet or a spreadsheet took their place. It helped that the software automatically inserted a marker wherever a slide was changed. Later, I inserted a few more markers at important points. Before publishing the videos to students, I covered the concepts in class, and solved a few examples. Students had the opportunity to download and watch the VLOs before a quiz. I solicited their initial reactions, and then released a fresh set of videos, now enclosed by a keyword search box as well as a table of contents (ToC). This version played within a web browser, but the embedded video was not downloadable. The final exam for the course followed one week after the ToC videos were released. Post the final, I asked the students to complete a questionnaire, and candidly describe their experiences with the vid-

Tech Tutes

eos. The response rate was nearly 100%. Given that all the participants were from the IT industry, they were comfortable with basic operations of video download, navigation and playback. Surprisingly, many among those who watched the version with a ToC did not make adequate use of the keyword search and topics index features.This could be because the videos were released “too close” to the exams. Some students experienced buffering difficulties from a slow internet connection, a reason often cited

for their inability to watch the entire set (See Video Helps on pg 41 for remarks by students)

Conclusion One comment from a student highlighted the potential for the new exercise:“... I think the best use of the video is when it is viewed before the class, and used instead of detailed classroom sessions. Because the videos are quite detailed by themselves, I would think it is best to skip discussing the concepts

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again in class...” In summary, ITenabling a campus adds a whole new dimension to the process of learning. Software platforms such as learning management systems and lecture capture systems can unleash the power of the installed infrastructure. In the next part of this article series, we shall see how these platforms can serve as starting points for the college to reach out to larger communities of learners by adopting a distance learning model.

Tech TUTES DIY Video Lectures

Shoot to Teach We don’t mean with guns. In this three-part series we bring to you tips on DIY video lectures. Part I takes you through the basic equipment required to shoot a video – camera BY TUSHAR KANWAR

Canon SX220 HS Point & Shoot can capture stunning still shots both outdoors and indoors

ot many of us would inspired to walk down the same path and have heard of Salman record your lectures for your students to Khan. Not the actor, but review in posterity, there are a few key the Harvard MBA who’s elements you will need to get right. In slowly but this first of a three-part surely turning the world of series, we help you pick the primary education on its right camera and equipREADER ROI head, one video at a time, ment to create memorable Pick the right equipment to with his Khan Academy initraining videos that will, create training tiative. Watch some of his hopefully, meet the needs videos videos, and you begin to of the fraternity and the realise how much power student populace for years Phones can also be the timely and appropriate to come. used for clips application of technology, Now, while conventional Memory cards are in this case the use of video wisdom might point you in necessary to store to teach, can hold. the direction of the digital while you shoot As educators, if you’re camcorder, a capable point-

and-click camera might well serve your needs better, in addition to doing double duty as a portable picture shooter as well. Here are some top-notch options you can consider. Canon SX220 HS Point & Shoot (Rs 15,995): An excellent shooter that can capture stunning still shots both outdoors and indoors, the SX200 HS really comes into its own while shooting fullh i g h - d e fi n i t i o n ( H D ) m o v e s a t 24-frames-per-second, replete with stereo sound. While shooting, you can use the impressive 14x optical zoom to reach the most distant subjects, and Canon’s Dynamic optical Image Stabiliser counteracts camera shake commonly record-

March 2012 EduTech

TECHNOLOGy

Tech Tutes

Tech Snippet | Notebook

New SMART Notebook with web integration Version 11 of SMART Notebook will enable teachers to integrate online resources into SMART Notebook files, enhancing instruction and increasing classroom efficiency. A new embedded web browser allows teachers to insert a live browser page directly into a SMART Notebook file. Users can then write, draw, and drag and drop content on the page. Version 11 includes widgets such as a dictionary and translator, which will let users handwrite a query, receive the

ed when shooting movies while moving, helping to produce smoother, sharper video footage. Sony Cybershot DSC-HX7V (Rs 14,700): Like its competitors, the Sony DSC-HX7V can shoot full HD videos at a higher 60-frames-per-second, and use the full 10x focal range during the recording. What’s interesting is that there is direct HDMI output from the camera, so you can instantly review the footage on a nearby LCD TV without waiting to download the video onto your PC. iPhone 4S or Motorola RAZR or Nokia N8: Surprised to find phones in this shortlist? Well, don’t be. With modern phone cameras packing in high-resolution shooting into a form factor that fits your pocket, you can rely on the phone you already have to do your video recording duties as well. The only caveat – since these phone cameras are slightly less sensitive to low-light shooting, do ensure you have a well-lit room when you’re recording. Good light can make a world of difference to your final video results. Camcorder options: The availability of cameras shooting HD videos doesn’t mean you can’t consider the camcorder as an option, but bear in mind that any camcorder you think of buying should meet three criteria – it should have the ability to shoot in HD video (1080p or 720p resolution) for a future proof investment, it should store the video in a digital format (not tape) for easy trans-

EduTech March 2012

answer and move that answer to the SMART Notebook software page. An avatar widget will let teachers bring their dynamic talking avatars into SMART Notebook 11 and save them to the Gallery. The widgets can be downloaded from the SMART Exchange™ website (exchange. smarttech.com), where educators can find over 51,000 learning resources and lessons, and used directly in a SMART Notebook 11 file.

Stanford on iTunes U provides access to a range of Stanford-related digital audio content via the iTunes Store, Apple’s popular online music, video, and podcast service

The free iTunes U app gives students access to video and audio lectures. See video lectures of the likes of MIT

ferability to the PC/web, and it should come with the provision to add in an external microphone (like a lapel mic) for disturbance-free sound capture. Once you’ve picked your camera, remember to pick up memory cards – most cameras are bundled with lowcapacity memory cards, but if you intend to shoot at the highest resolution, a 32 GB memory card is recommended – HD video really ends up consuming large amounts of memory. In addition, invest in a tripod with a movable head that allows for panning and up and down movement – nothing can be more distracting than a video that is either shot at an awkward angle or one that is not steady all the way through. Ensure that your video setup is at the height of the

average student’s head – this ensures the resulting video delivery is natural and classroom-like. Next month, we will look at the tips to keep in mind while shooting and editing the videos you’ve shot. In the meanwhile, you can check out some of these links to see how the best in the world have made their teaching available for free online. http://itunes.stanford.edu/ http://web.mit.edu/itunesu/ http://www.queensu.ca/www/itunesu/ http://www.khanacademy.org/.

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Cutting edge learning tools

EDGEX

Disruptive Educational Research Conference

Learning: Whole New Ballgame Learning involves a deepening process of participation in a community of practice. EDU spoke to experts gathered under the EDGEX 2012 umbrella to discuss disruptive technologies in higher education and to learn more about games, simulations, informal learning, learning analytics and other out-of-the-box methods that are making learning fun and viral By Charu Bahri

handful of youngsters sit in front of a computer, taking turns at a game, replete with sound effects and action-packed scenes. Their countenances are thoughtful. Surely playing a game isn’t hard work? But they insist that far from wasting time, they are honing their decisionmaking, tactical and micromanagement skills, and are learning the ropes of administration, development, diplomacy, exploration, technology and surprisingly—warfare. Sounds far-fetched? But, it’s plausible, if the game in question is Civilisation—a strategy contest. Assuming the role of the emperor of a civilisation, each player attempts to build his or her empire from scratch, starting from 4000 BC through March 2012 EduTech

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Cutting edge learning tools

“We often compare online learning and traditional learning with the presumption that traditional learning is more interactive, this is not in fact true” —Stephen Downes

Research Officer, National Research Council Canada, Institute for Information Technology time. Numerous choices must be made —where to build new cities, which in turn will expand to new settlements, how to use land in and around cities and what highway and railway city connectivity projects should be taken up. Also, what technology advances should be adopted from the games’ technology tree. If that were not enough, each player chooses which civilisation to play—fancy being an American, or Mongol, or Roman? The game inculcates a heady competitive spirit—destroying all the other civilisations, or reaching the end of the modern era with the highest score, or winning the space race by reaching the star system of Alpha Centauri is all i t t a k e s t o b e a d j u d g e d t h e winning civilisation! No wonder students need to put on their thinking cap to play Civilisation.

New Learning Tools The immense learning potential of such technology-driven means has got the attention of an emerging breed of educators in developed nations. Serious (not frivolous) games facilitate learning by doing, as students learn within the confines of the virtual world where they can fail and learn from their immersive experiences with no consequences. Games exemplify advanced learning tools by providing deep contextualisation of the decisions educators want learners to be able to make. Facilitated reflection outside the game furthers this process. Other cutting-edge technologies that are being applied to learning, more, less

EduTech March 2012

in India, include simulations, virtual worlds and network-based learning.

Learning X.O These big words aren’t as complicated as they sound. Learning X.0 is a moniker for the ongoing evolution in technologyassisted learning, where the X in X.0 represents generations of thinking and approaches. According to Viplav Baxi, e-Learning Researcher and Entreprenueur and lead organiser of the EDGEX Conference, “Whereas generation 1.0 demonstrated the power of visualisation, of search over aggregated knowledge, of 3D immersion, of multimedia-based learning, generation 2.0 has facilitated the power to network and to leverage collective insight through social networks, learning 2.0 styles, collaboration and ever growing news forms of media. Generation 3.0 is still nascent and further improves on Generation 2.0 by adding ubiquity and semantic context to the teaching-learning process.”

Gen Y Learning Models Practically, this translates into technology-enabled, network-based, collaborative, social, informal and community approaches to learning. We the People: Project Citizen, a Centre for Civic Education programme, exemplifying service learning. By helping participants learn how to monitor and influence public policy, it aims to foster support for democratic values and principles, and competent and responsible participation in governance. Project Citizen’s students work

cooperatively to identify a public policy problem in their community such as, water pollution in nearby rivers. They research on the effects of pollution on health, identify the sources of pollution, and come up with a plan to clear up the river. Subsequently, they create a political action plan to enlist the support of local or state authorities for their proposed policy. Participants finally showcase their work to civic-minded community members. Project Citizen differs from traditional learning methods centred on the consumption of information, wherein students would be informed about public policy problems and available solutions. Interestingly, learners are not asked to repeat facts to demonstrate learning because the process of presenting their proposed solutions, based on their understanding, takes them through that. The year 2008 saw the dawn of another term in the crowded e-learning space— MOCCA—or massive open online learning. Connectivism and Connective Knowledge comes under this learning genre. CCK is an open online course that explores the concepts of connectivism and connective knowledge and their application as a framework for theories of teaching and learning. It is open to everyone and there is no fee or subscriptions required. It helps a learner understand educational systems of the future as also make sense of the transformative impact of technology in teaching and learning over the last decade. It is consistent with the needs of the 21st century

Cutting edge learning tools

and takes into account trends in learning, the use of technology and networks, and the diminishing half-life of knowledge. Connective knowledge is not the property of one person, rather, the growing connected knowledge network is connective knowledge. Though CCK thrives on multi-tool learning environments, findings from a survey of CCK, 2008 participants showed that though it attracted adult, informal learners, who were not concerned about course completion, time constraints, language barriers, and ICT skills affected the participants’ choice of tools. While blogs, wikis, social networks, messaging systems, etc., are popular they may not be the best choices for learning activities. It is important to understand the extent to which multitool environments are effective in supporting education and learning frame guidelines to optimise their effectiveness for learning. These fresh approaches to learning are being hailed as the need of the hour. They represent a shift in focus, from the teacher to the student. And learning no longer need be in a closed classroom.

True Learning Dr Les Foltos, Director of Education Innovation, Peer-Ed, an organisation that trains teacher leaders in ways to help their colleagues integrate technology into classroom activities, is at the forefront of the group of far-thinking educators. Describing how the new student-centric learning approach differs from the con-

TECHNOLOGy

EDGEX 2012

DGEX, the Disruptive Educational Research Conference, aims at presenting cutting edge thought leadership and research in education, technology and rich media. It is the perfect opportunity for Indian educators to familiarise themselves with what’s happening in the field. The key themes of EDGEX are: Learning X.0: It is a broad term covering the continuous evolution in education and education technology. In its widest use, it covers networkbased, collaborative, social, informal and community led approaches to learning that are becoming very crucial today. Simulations & Serious Games: Advanced learning tools that must be used at strategic scale to impact learning. Such new media and techniques now present an important addition to e-Learning. Virtual Worlds: Virtual world technologies allow individuals to learn virtually. Such technologies could have a major impact on the way today’s tech-savvy generation learns by fostering a new kind of interactive online learning. For example, surgeons use virtual ‘twins’ of their patients to practice for surgery or tiny surgical procedures on a larger scale. Network-based Learning: George Siemens and Stephen Downes founded Connectivism, a new theory of learning based on the premise that knowledge exists in the world rather than in the head of an individual. Connectivism is perceived as learning for the digital age and it is providing rich insights into how educational systems could be in the near future. In a nutshell, connectivist teaching is to model and demonstrate and connectivist learning is to practice and reflect.

ventional learning model, he says, “Traditionally, students are expected to consume information, most of which comes from the teacher or the textbooks. Students are then made to demonstrate learning of information so consumed by recalling and repeating facts.” In contrast, the new model aims at engaging students emotionally as well as cogni-

“Learning is no longer about pouring knowledge into learners and expecting them to know it” —Clark Quinn

Executive Director, Quinnovation and Senior Director, Interaction & Mobile for the Internet Time Alliance

tively with real world challenges. Students are empowered to use technology to acquire and apply real world knowledge to solve these problems. Learning is thus wrapped around the emergent opportunities. Taking forward the public policy example, Dr Foltos elucidates, “In the process of using technology to gather information, analyse and synthesise the information, and share their conclusions with others, students develop key skills outlined in India’s Holistic Learning framework. These include basic math, critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills. More significantly, students become knowledge creators instead of consumers.” Call it meaningful learning, applied learning or social learning; the new method stands out for its holistic approach to learning. Notably, the new pedagogy is grounded in how we really learn. “Learning is no longer about pouring knowledge into learners and expectMarch 2012 EduTech

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Cutting edge learning tools

ing them to know it”, to quote Dr Clark Quinn, Executive Director, Quinnovation and Senior Director, Interaction & Mobile for the Internet Time Alliance, an organisation that helps corporations and governments use networks to accelerate performance. Contrary to the ‘knowledge dump’ method, the new model leads to improved abilities to do things better.

Technology: A Facilitator Technology plays a major role in learning revisited, be it games, simulations, online learning, or mobile learning, another emerging area that is facilitating a shift in the place of learning, from artificial contexts out in the world where it allows students to capture information, perform tasks, communicate and collaborate around that information, and layer learning on top of the experience. The new age learning model is an instructional model that combines technology with powerful content and pedagogy, with the aim of helping students to learn. Technology is the underlying enabler. But learning X.0 is not so much about using technology to deliver learning as it is about empowering students to play a larger role in the learning process, not by pressurising them, but by eliciting deeper student engagement. Naturally, the new approach scores high with students. Amruth BR, CEO, Vita Beans Neural Solutions observes, “Students are the most receptive stakeholders of new learning technologies. Mainly because these new technologies are shifting the focus back to students. The old mindset of putting curriculum at the centre of education is dying. Instead of saying ‘these are the topics that need to be learnt—lets see who learns them best’, we are now saying ‘these are our students—lets see what topics and skills each one of them can learn best’. Each student’s learning styles and unique abilities are becoming the focus of education.” These powerful learning opportunities are more enjoyable for students than aggregating and reciting knowledge. Another relevant point is that common misconceptions about the use of technology as a learning aid don’t stand anymore

EduTech March 2012

since the medium has evolved and can deliver favourable results. For instance, it is believed that technology-supported online learning is one-sided and offers students no real interaction. “It needn’t be so,” says Stephen Downes, Research Officer, National Research Council Canada, Institute for Information Technology. “Most online learning offers a greater level of interaction than what students studying in very large classes achieve. In such situations, even traditional learning

“The acute shortage of faculty and need to reach the masses are two reasons enhancing the scope of distance learning in India” —Shanath Kumar

Head of e-Learning, Sikkim Manipal University is not interactive as many students would face difficulties in conversing with their instructor and find themselves very much on their own.” Interaction plays an important role in the new pedagogy because it supports learning by creating an environment for practice and fostering authentic reflection, the two core aspects of the learning process. As a result, the courses Downes designs and

delivers, Massive Open Online Courses, are modelled on a connectivist pedagogy. They are based on the idea of connection and interaction.

Online Learning Contrary to the idea of online learning being a solo affair, Siddharth Banerjee, CEO, Indusgeeks Solutions Pvt Ltd, says it offers scope for self-paced learning as well as competitive learning in a (multiuser) game-based environment such as the Metamersive Platform Indusgeeks offers. Open online courses, designed to help students develop much-needed employment and life skills, are extremely relevant in the Indian context, where Downes points out “traditional learning is simply not available for many, and learning that is not available is not interactive.” Online learning extends the reach of learning to many people, both in terms of better access and lower cost. Technology-aided visual learning could be a boon for the poor and undereducated in India, provided internet access can be increased beyond the current eight per cent nationwide standing. Prof Shanath Kumar, Head of e-Learning, Sikkim Manipal University says the acute shortage of faculty and need to reach the masses are two reasons enhancing the scope of distance learning in India. He is also of the opinion that the learning material offered by online courses is better designed and structured, since traditionally delivered learning has mostly substituted instructional design by their expert faculty. The ability to learn ‘anytime, anywhere’, that is, providing a more flexible learning provision is another plus point. Dave Cormier, Manager of Web Communications and Innovations, University of Prince Edward Island and Principal, Edactive Technologies adds, “Online learning can be a response to the need for lifelong learning that is brought about by the loss of ‘lifelong’ jobs. Online learning has had far more success with people who are looking to learn more with the potential of it helping their existing work or allowing them to move elsewhere.” That said, Downes supports online

Cutting edge learning tools

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“In the process of using technology to gather information, analyse and synthesise the information, and share their conclusions with others, students develop key skills outlined in India’s Holistic Learning framework” —Les Foltos

Director of Education Innovation, Peer-Ed

learning with a caveat—“As long as teachers first understand the motivations and benefits of the process and how to optimise learning, by employing online learning to support their own teaching and development before recommending and using it for their students.”

Preparing for Newness Much as the new approach to learning sounds fun and games (because that is one aspect); teachers must be ready for it. Teachers are the pillars of learning and will continue to be so. Besides revised curriculum and richer forms of assessment, Dr Quinn points out that the new approach needs teachers capable of dealing with this approach to pedagogy. Prof Kumar sees the need for major academic, technology, education psychology and sociological initiatives to bring in changes in pedagogical practices. More intensive training of faculty in higher education institutions is also warranted. “We need to do more to develop learner and teacher digital literacy skills. American media scholar Henry Jenkins lists 11 (play, distributed cognition, transmedia navigation, judgement etc.,) and I would add creativity,” says Grainne Conole, Professor of Learning Innovation, University of Leicester, UK and Director of Beyond Distance Research Alliance. Arguably, teachers would be more ready to adopt the new systems if they could see the benefits accruing to them. “While technology in no way lessens the role of the teacher in learning, a range of learning design conceptual tools help

teachers design more effectively,” adds Prof Conole. Amruth emphasises the need to build user-friendly technology solutions. “Instead of pushing fancy technologies at teachers and blaming them for not keeping up, researchers and developers must design tools that can be adopted by a technology-novice, middleaged teacher with as much ease and enthusiasm as a tech-savvy teenager. Teachers are just like students—they show interest only if the new tools and pedagogy are interesting and exciting from their point of view.”

Growing Acceptance “Institutional buy-in is a must,” says Banerjee. “That means setting aside budgets to invest in new resources to support the learning methods and dealing with false notions surrounding the new techniques—for instance, people doubt the ability of games to foster learning. A designated champion could help clarify the use of these tools and grow acceptance for the new methods from teachers, students and the industry.” Serious games and simulations are definitely more suited to create both better digital learning experiences and a better fit to on-the-job requirements. Still, institutions are cautious in treading this path because sophisticated learning tools are unaffordable, from the time to develop and cost perspective. Jatinder Singh Bahrey, Director of Operations, Atelier, is optimistic about the future. “Traditional learning solutions meet scale and affordability but not quality. Our passion is to create innovative digital learning experi-

ences (read serious games and simulations) that reduce expert involvement in development, shorten the time to market, significantly impact learning and onthe-job performance and visibly enhance learning return on investment. Now, that we have successfully created a framework that automates and templatises the process of creating a simulation, the creation costs would drop. And with a payper-use, cloud-based delivery model, use of simulations for learning, skilling, reskilling and assessment becomes a never-so-easy and affordable option.” A greater number of students would also opt for open online learning if it is explicitly endorsed by the industry. After all, education is still largely about finding employment in India. The education sector must win the confidence of the industry by establishing that technology-driven online programmes foster an interactive, inquiry-driven instructional mode, and do not propagate the conventional push information model. It’s a lot to do, especially as institutions and teachers simultaneously climb a steep learning curve. But it would be worth it. Technology can deliver outcomes that will “trump traditional schooling in engagement and ability,” to quote Dr Quinn. That isn’t hard to understand, the excitement and enthusiasm of the students playing Civilisation is palpable. Indeed, it’s all about giving more power to learners! Subscribe to the daily electronic newsletter from EDU at http://edu-leaders.com/content/newsletters March 2012 EduTech

the global perspective From

INSIDE 53 | Scholars Seek Better Ways to Track Impact Online

o f h i g h e r ed u c a t i o n

Fall of Libyan Regime Brings New Opportunities for American Universities Developing its 17 public universities with 350,000 students is in the priority list for the interim government By David L Wheeler

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Libya is moving away from guns and tanks as opportunities open up in higher education collaborations

EduTech March 2012

he images of Libya that linger in many minds are of tanks, black smoke rising from buildings, and militia members brandishing submachine guns. But for academics, those images may soon be replaced by one of a Libyan campus with a big “open for business” banner. Optimists among Libyans say the country has a chance to go from chaos to a cornerstone of stability in the region. They are eager to build the higher-education connections needed to support programme development in a range of areas, including vocational education and leadership training. Although the US Embassy building was destroyed during the rebellion against the Qaddafi regime, and embassy personnel are scrambling to replace such basics as visa-issuing equipment, they see establishing academic cooperation with Libya as a top priority. They and other Western observers say opportunities abound for higher-education collaboration in medicine, engineering, Englishlanguage instruction, archaeology, and other fields. “It’s a new country with a new relationship to the United States and with open possibilities,” says Samuel Werberg, a cultural-affairs officer with the US Embassy in Morocco who just did a stint in Tripoli. Libyan oil, and the cash that comes with it, means that Libya and the United States could work as partners, not as one country doling out resources to the other. “I didn’t get a sense from anyone that they were looking for a handout,” says Werberg. Many senior Libyan professors were US-trained in the 1970s

Global.Chronicle.Com in the war, and creating totally new army and and are eager to strengthen a relationship that police forces. “We are building a nation started warming up after the US Department from scratch,” he says. He is in the middle of State, in 2006, ended Libya’s status as a of “democracy in training,” he says, and “state sponsor of terrorism.” Libyan academics spends two to three hours a day talking with have “great affection for American higher edupeople who are demonstrating outside cation,” says Kirk E Simmons, Director of globSign up for a free weekly government offices or complaining about al relations and promotion at Pennsylvania electronic newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education at unsolved problems. State University. He visited Libya in 2010 with Chronicle.Com/Globalnewsletter He says the government wants to develop a group of US university leaders who attended The Chronicle of Higher Education is Libya’s 17 public universities, which enroll a Libya-sponsored conference where the gova US-based company with a weekly about 350,000 students and have many shorternment sought advice on a plan to become an newspaper and a website updated comings. “The quality is not great,” he says. education hub for Africa. daily, at Global.Chronicle.com, that cover all aspects of university life. The universities share the problem, common These days, the first question many potential With over 90 writers, editors, and in the Middle East and North Africa, of enrolvisitors to Libya have is about how safe it is. correspondents stationed around ments that swamp facilities. The University of Libyans and Western visitors say the peace is the globe, The Chronicle provides Tripoli’s medical school, for example, has being kept without the presence of heavily timely news and analysis of academ20,000 students, about the same as the armed patrols. Most cities do not look bombed ic ideas, developments and trends. freshman classes in all US medical out, basic telecommunications are functionschools combined. ing, and the public mood is largely energetic. Many former Libyan students say they have “For the first time in my travels, I have noticed longed for a classroom experience that would let them play a that people are smiling in the streets,” says Tamim M Baiou, a more active role in learning. Miyoti Kilani, who studied at the Libyan-American who runs AlRakiza Training, a Libya-based University of Garyounis in Benghazi, says that while her profeseducation, training, and consulting company. That said, Westsors were qualified in their disciplines, she was not taught how erners should not expect all of the infrastructure they have at to write research papers, make presentations, or respond to home, such as broadband internet access and ATM’s on case studies. “It was all about having lectures and going home every corner. to study what the professor said,” she reports in an email. Libyan academics say they are interested in updating their Democracy in Training undergraduate curricula, developing budgeting systems, addMustafa Abushagur, Deputy Prime Minister of Libya, is on ing social and cultural activities for students, finding ways to set leave from the Rochester Institute of Technology, for which he up quality control at universities, and improving language eduserved as president of the Dubai campus. He says the interim cation. The study of languages, including English, has generLibyan government, in place at least until the elections schedally been separated from professional education, leaving Libyan uled for late June, has many problems to solve, including professionals isolated from their international peers. strengthening security, getting medical care for those wounded The Qaddafi regime did not encourage the creation of private businesses other than those that benefited the dictator’s family, so Libyans and potential Western partners alike say a new educational emphasis on management and entrepreneurship will be needed.

“Libyan oil, and the cash that comes with it, means that Libya and the United States could work as partners, not as one country doling out resources to the other”

A Post-Qaddafi Libya In the 2009-10 Global Competitiveness Report of the World Economic Forum, Libya was ranked 133rd in the world for the quality of its management schools. “There’s lots of petroleum engineers, but they may not have a well-rounded business perspective,” says Charles (Chuck) Dittrich, head of the U.S.-Libya Business Association, which helps American companies doing business in Libya. Dittrich says American universities interested in partnerships should look at what the training needs are for a post-Qaddafi Libya and follow those opportunities. Lots of new publications, websites, and other media have started up, he says. The support services that cluster around oil production—catering, transportation, restaurants, and schools—will thrive. Many Libyan professionals will not be able to quit working to March 2012 EduTech

THE GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

“For universities outside Libya interested in collaborating with universities there, advisers suggest that academics nurture as many Libyan contacts as possible”

go back to graduate school, so professional certification will be needed in many fields, such as auditing, urban planning, cost accounting, construction management, working with building codes, and managing international partnerships. Visa difficulties will be one barrier to immediate educational exchanges. The US Embassy in Tripoli does not expect to be able to issue visas for another six months; participants in government-sponsored programmes such as Fulbright scholarships are given support to travel to Cairo or Tunis to get their visas there. As Libyan consulates make the transition to a new government, they, too, are limited in their ability to issue visas. A trickle of academics has been able to cross the Libyan border, in either direction. Abdulatif-A-Muhamed Shaban, Libyan dean of the University of Tripoli’s College of Education on its Janzour campus, who has a British passport, visited Ball State University and nearby campuses to see how they train teachers. Susan Kane, an Oberlin College archaeologist with a longstanding interest in Libya’s rich trove of archaeological sites, is in Libya helping to map Cyrene, a 1,000-year-old site near the coast that was once a Greek colony and is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. Such places were dismissed by Qaddafi as being unimportant versities that were participating, says Baiou, who runs to the country’s heritage. Archaeologists convened by UNESCO AlRakiza Training. in Paris in October, just as the war was ending, expressed an For universities outside Libya interested in collaborating with interest in getting into Libya as soon as possible, and agreed universities there, advisers suggest that academics nurture as that when they did gain access, they should assist Libyans in many Libyan contacts as possible. Government turnover is securing sites and mapping and documenting their conditions expected after the elections, and the government will also before resuming excavations. be reviewing university administrators and possibly purging Ball State, after the visit of the Libyan dean, is planning some those who were loyal to Qaddafi but had little interest in higher workshops in Rome on curriculum development and teaching education. The Libyan contacts will largely need to be and technology, with a handful of Ball State faculty members cultivated by phone, email, and Skype until the visa situation and 30 or 40 Libyan faculty members expected improves, although many Americans, including to attend. Italy was chosen as a meeting ground some students, are eager to visit. that would be more easily accessible for profesSteve O Michael, provost at Arcadia University, Libyan students sors from both countries. near Philadelphia, who was also in the group of in the US Ball State is also preparing proposals to work Americans who visited Libya in 2010, says stuincreased from with the University of Tripoli’s education coldents from Arcadia’s peace and conflictlege more broadly and to provide online coursresolution programme want to visit Libya. es leading to advanced education degrees, “They love to go to troubled regions and see how which the Libyan dean saw as especially useful countries are healing their social systems,” in the 2005-6 for female faculty members, who, because of he says. Michael is eager to rebuild his academic year to local tradition, are not always able to travel outLibyan connections and says he hopes that 1,494 in the side of the country without being accompanied American universities work together strategical2009-10 by male relatives. ly in Libya instead of individually setting up “one-off” programmes. Michael and many others with interests in More Libyans in US Libyan academic exchanges encourage a long-term view, with The Libyan government is eager to send more faculty members appropriate expectations. In Libya, Susan Kane, the archaeoloto Western universities for advanced degrees, since many Libygist and professor of art at Oberlin, wrote in an email soon after an professors have only master’s degrees. In the next few years, her arrival there, “there is a lot of good work to be done here, the growth of the number of Libyans in the United States but it is going to be slow and difficult until a proper infrastrucshould continue a steep upward curve. The number of Libyan ture and more language training is in place.” students in the United States increased from 38 in the 2005-6 academic year, when Libya’s terrorist status ended, to 1,494 in the 2009-10 academic year. A 2010 education fair in Tripoli drew Subscribe to a free weekly electronic newsletter from the Chronicle of 8,000 attendees interested in enrolling at the 19 American uniHigher Education at http://chronicle.com/globalnewsletter

EduTech March 2012

Global.Chronicle.Com

Scholars Seek Better Ways to Track Impact Online Traditional metrics do not indicate how articles are being consumed by readers. Altmetrics is trying to change that By Jennifer Howard

by photos.com

n academe, the game of how to win friends and influence people is serious business. Administrators and grant makers want proof that a researcher’s work has life beyond the library or the lab. But the current system of measuring scholarly influence doesn’t reflect the way many researchers work in an environment driven more and more by the social web. Research that used to take months or years to reach readers can now find them almost instantly via blogs and Twitter. That kind of activity escapes traditional metrics like the impact factor, which indicates how often a journal is cited, not how its articles are really being consumed by readers. An approach called altmetrics—short for alternative metrics—aims to measure web-driven scholarly interactions, such as how often research is tweeted, blogged about, or bookmarked. “There’s a gold mine of data that hasn’t been harnessed yet about impact outside the traditional citation-based impact,” says Dario Taraborelli, a senior research analyst with the Strategy Team at the Wikimedia Foundation and a proponent of the idea. Interest in altmetrics is on the rise, but it’s not quite right to call it a movement. The approach could better be described as a sprawling constellation of projects and like-minded people working at research institutions, libraries, and publishers.

Current system of measuring scholarly influence doesn’t reflect the new environment driven by social media

They’ve been talking on Twitter (marking their messages with the #altmetrics hashtag), sharing resources and tools online, and developing ideas at occasional workshops and symposia. They’re united by the idea that “metrics based on a diverse set of social sources could yield broader, richer, and timelier assessments of current and potential scholarly impact,” as a call for contributions to a

forthcoming altmetrics essay collection puts it. Jason Priem, a third-year graduate student at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a leader in this push to track impact via the social web. Scholarly workflows are moving online, leaving traces that can be documented—not just in articles but on March 2012 EduTech

THE GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE social networks and reference sites such as Mendeley and Zotero, where researchers store and annotate scholarship of interest. “It’s like we have a fresh snowfall across this docu-plain, and we have fresh footprints everywhere,” he says. “That has the potential to really revolutionise how we measure impact.” Priem helped write a manifesto, posted on the website altmetrics.org, which articulates the problems with traditional evaluation schemes. “As the volume of academic literature explodes, scholars rely on filters to select the most relevant and significant sources from the rest,” the manifesto argues. “Unfortunately, scholarship’s three main filters for importance are failing.” Peer review “has served scholarship well” but has become slow and unwieldy and rewards conventional thinking. Citation-counting measures such as the h-index take too long to accumulate. And the impact factor of journals gets misapplied as a way to assess an individual researcher’s performance, which it wasn’t designed to do. “I’m not down on citations,”Priem says. “I’m just saying it’s only part of the story. It’s become the only part of the story we care about.” That’s where altmetrics comes in. It’s a way to measure the “downstream use” of research, says Cameron Neylon, a senior scientist at Britain’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, and another contributor to the manifesto. Any system that turns out to be a useful way to measure influence will tempt the unscrupulous to try and game it, though. One concern is that someone could build a program, for instance, that would keep tweeting links to an article and inflate its altmetrics numbers.

Devising a Method So how do you reliably measure fluid, fast-paced, web-based, non-hierarchical reactions to scholarly work? That problem has been keeping Priem busy. He’s part of the team that designed an altmetrics project called Total-Impact. Researchers can go to the site and enter many forms of research, including blog posts, articles, data sets, and soft-

EduTech March 2012

“An approach called altmetrics—short for alternative metrics—aims to measure web-driven scholarly interactions, such as how often research is tweeted, blogged about, or bookmarked” ware they’ve written. Then the TotalImpact application will search the internet for downloads, Twitter links, mentions in open-source software libraries, and other indicators that the work is being noticed. “We go out on the web and find every sort of impact and present them to the user,” Priem explains. When possible, they gather data directly from services’ open-application programming interfaces, or API’s. These are very early days for TotalImpact, and there’s a lot of information it doesn’t gather yet. For instance, right now it only searches blogs indexed by the site Research Blogging. That “amounts to a very small subset of science blogs,” according to Priem, who adds that most of the other metrics are more robust. “Although it’s still in alpha and has plenty of bugs, if you upload identifiers, you can and do get all sorts of impact information back,” he says. “We’ve gotten many reports of people using the application, although certainly not in vast numbers” yet. “We’ve also gotten many requests from academic publishers and creators of scholarly web applications to embed TI data into their pages” using Total-Impact’s open API, he says. He doesn’t know yet how significant Total-Impact will prove to be. Will scholars take to it? Will tenure-and-promotion gatekeepers be willing to add altmetrics to the evaluation mix any time soon?

Those are big unknowns right now. The long-term goal is “to completely change the way scholars and administrators think about academic impact” and get them to move away from what Priem calls “a citation-fetishising article monoculture.” But he’s realistic. “Clearly, that’s going to take some time,” he says. The Total-Impact site features several cautions about how it should and should not be used. It may help a researcher ascertain the “minimum impact” his/ her work has made on the scholarly community; it can provide a sense of who’s bookmarking or responding to that work. But it’s not yet an indicator of comprehensive impact. “Take it all with a grain of salt,” a warning on the site advises. “The meaning of these metrics are not yet well understood.” One of Priem’s Total-Impact partners is Heather A Piwowar. As a postdoctoral researcher at DataOne, affiliated with the National Evolutionary Synthesis Centre and the Dryad digital repository, she studies patterns in how researchers share and reuse data. Piwowar and Priem have been building Total-Impact in their spare time. “Our day jobs are being a grad student and a postdoc,” she says, but “we just couldn’t stop ourselves. It seemed to have such profound possibilities.” The main difficulty they’ve encountered, she says, is finding sources of open data. Every blog post has a URL, and “you can search Twitter and other

Global.Chronicle.Com places for that URL,” she says. But the Total-Impact algorithms can’t just rely on Google searches, because those “aren’t open and free data,” she says. There’s a lot of information behind the results of a Google search that TotalImpact can’t really get to yet. Another technical challenge for altmetrics is what to do about multiple digital “addresses” for a specific article online. Someone who tweets about a paper will probably link to a URL but not include the digital object identifier, or DOI, that makes the paper more permanently findable online, even if the URL changes. “So it’s been more of a challenge than we expected to gather all of the synonym identifiers for an object and then search for all of them” in all the places where people might leave evidence of use, Piwowar says. Right now, the Total-Impact group has to go ask Mendeley for an article’s permanent Mendeley address, or “identifier,” PubMed for its identifier, and so on. “Having one place where a lot of these identifiers are aggregated would be very helpful,” she says. Software and data can be especially tricky to track. A piece of code may be hosted by an open repository like GitHub but not cited in ways that are easily recognised. And scholarly culture doesn’t always encourage openness. “There’s a lack of reward for sharing data,” Piwowar says. Altmetrics’ emphasis on openness aligns it with the open-access movement, whose goal is to make published research freely available online. “Once you see the potential for using the web

for research communication,” says Britain’s Neylon, it’s hard to look at the traditional model of scholarly communication “without a growing sense of horror.” Altmetrics has made some inroads in the publishing world. For instance, one open-access publisher, the Public Library of Science, or PLoS, has been experimenting seriously with articlelevel metrics, a fresh way to measure who’s using PLoS articles and how. Unlike PLoS, however, many publishers are not keen to share usage statistics with the world. Neither are some institutional repositories. Piwowar says that proprietary attitude is the wrong approach for publishers to take. Altmetrics “is a call to people who host research projects to make information about their impact openly accessible,” she says.

Gaming the System As its proponents themselves acknowledge, the altmetrics approach has vulnerabilities that go beyond how much data can be had for free. Just because an idea gets buzz online doesn’t always mean it has genuine intellectual value, as anyone who follows social media knows. And what about gaming the system? “Can Tweets Predict Citations?” asked a paper published last year in the Journal of Medical Internet Research by Gunther Eysenbach, a senior scientist and professor of health policy at the University of Toronto. Based on a survey he conducted, Dr Eysenbach concluded that the answer is

“Altmetrics’ emphasis on openness aligns it with the open-access movement, whose goal is to make published research freely available online”

yes; tweets often do flag papers that turn out to be important. But measures of influence on Twitter “should be primarily seen as metrics for social impact (buzz, attentiveness, or popularity) and as a tool for researchers, journal editors, journalists, and the general public to filter and identify hot topics,” the researcher wrote. He cautioned that significant research in many fields wasn’t necessarily going to get picked up by people who are on Twitter. But traditional citations too have limitations, Dr Eysenbach pointed out; social-media-based metrics should be considered complementary to citations rather than alternatives to them. The key question might be how vulnerable altmetrics, or any metrics, is to being gamed. Traditional measures of influence aren’t immune to corruption; journals have been known to drive up their impact factors by self-citing. Taraborelli of the Wikimedia Foundation says “we should expect major attempts at gaming the system” if and when altmetrics really catches on. “My expectation is it will be an arms race,” he says. But there are ways to build in safeguards against gaming, he says, much as people keep creating better spam filters. The inclusive, diffuse approach that drives altmetrics may actually help protect it. A Godzilla-like monster ranking “is the best way to manipulate the system, to make it dependent on curation strategies that may end up invalidating the metric itself,” Taraborelli says. “The last thing we want is a system that’s dominated by a monolithic ranker for all the scholarly literature.” Researchers’ behaviour on the social web works against the idea that one number should rule them all, Taraborelli says: “I think we’re moving to a system where, regardless of the benefits of single, monopolistic metrics, people will be able to set their own filters” to locate the research they’re most interested in, wherever it lives. Subscribe to a free weekly electronic newsletter from the Chronicle of Higher Education at http://chronicle.com/globalnewsletter March 2012 EduTech

by Alpesh Dholakia

The Design Maverick Pradyumna Vyas, Director, NID, is unorthodox in thoughts and design; a self-believer, who sculpted his destiny By Charu Bahri

EduTech March 2012

e sculpted his own groove literally. And, he thanks his liberal upbringing for giving him the free hand to chart this satisfying and highly successful journey. Pradyumna Vyas, Director, National Institute of Design had a rather vagabond childhood, thanks to his forest officer father’s transferable job. Each new posting, brought young Vyas a new set of friends, a new school, new surroundings, in short, it meant undergoing a transformation of sorts. Being a forest officer’s son also meant living all that much closer to nature and its first inhabitants in the interiors of protected forest areas. The ambience had many lessons for the young lad—he studied in municipal or missionary schools and counted children of tribal origin as his mates. This varied

Pradyumna Vyas

fact file Name: Pradyumna Vyas Current engagement: Director, National Institute of Design things he likes: Books: The Story of My Experiments With Truth by MK Gandhi/The Road Less Travelled by Scott Peck Movie: Three Idiots, Taare Zameen Par music: Beethoven Cuisine: Home cooked food pastime: Playing with and upkeep of my dog Lola HOLIDAY DESTINATION: North Sikkim HIS LITTLE SECRET: I’d like to have a date with myself, to enjoy my own company

environment every two to three years made Vyas an adept swimmer in the sea of newness. In his words: “I learnt to adjust with people from diverse circumstances.” And thus were planted the seeds of a people’s person in Vyas.

Destiny Beckons His fascination for forms wasn’t found odd by his parents and there was no opposition. In a day and age when any such passion for the fine arts would have met with scorn and an instant put down, Vyas only met encouragement from his folks. “My parents were happy to let me find myself and pursue my happiness without impressing their beliefs on me,” he reminisces. Vyas, now a teenager, began indulging his fascination for solid forms with wood

and metal. “I had no professional training or tools in sculpture, but expressing my creativity through the medium became a passion. I worked with whatever means available, inspired by Raghunath Phadke of Dhar in Madhya Pradesh.” Of course, Vyas’s parents had normal middle class aspirations for their son, that he would become an engineer or a doctor, the two standard reputed professions in those days. And Vyas did not disappoint them. Fortunately, technology appealed to his hands-on persona. Says Vyas, “Practical is easier for me than theory. Physics and maths were my forte, chemistry and biology less so. I am perceptive by nature”. So, Vyas chose to pursue engineering. However, his love for sculpture grew during the years he spent at Gwalior Engineering College. Destiny guided his next move. In 1981, Vyas’s parents, now posted in Jabalpur, played host to two professors from IIT Bombay. Intrigued by the some sculptures displayed in their home, the guests enquired about the creator. When told it was Vyas, who by then had graduated, they suggested that he apply for a postgraduate degree in industrial design from IIT Bombay. “They felt that the course was right up my street, considering my background in engineering and artistic aptitude. My parents liked the idea as well. They believed that any course put out by the IIT brand would be worthwhile!” The entrance test was a breeze. Vyas was one of the top scoring students in the industrial design centre programme. Soon enough, it was time for Vyas to launch his career.

Starting Out The first two years of his career were spent in Mumbai as a product design consultant before he headed overseas to Kilkenny Design Centre in Kilkenny, the Republic of Ireland, for a three year stint. Back in India in 1989, he joined the NID. Says Vyas, “At that time, industrial design projects were hard to come by. I had a lucky break when Eveready approached me to design a flashlight.” The torch went on to become a

PROFILE

bestseller, selling 4.5 million pieces across the country and firmly established Vyas as a design wizard. Vyas’s winning design streak continued. His next venture was for Bharat Electronics Limited, a walky-talky that won him accolades. He engaged in designs that promoted traditional craft forms and furthered a unique blend of craft and high technology. And he divided his time in workshops to acquire and impart new skills.

From Maestro to Master Geniuses are generally perceived to be reclusive. But Vyas had verve and an affinity for people. For him teaching was a natural progression and professorship an easy transformation from the role of a designer. He explains, “The varied exposure in childhood has given me a comfort level with people—students, NGO workers, heads of corporations, or anyone else. Since I understand where they come from, I can adapt accordingly.” Adds Vyas, “I believe teachers must create a learning environment in which individual students can blossom. We must realise that each student is gifted. Their talents must be allowed to emerge and each student’s inherent intelligence nurtured. Teaching is not about conditioning minds or pushing ideas. A teacher’s greatest tool is experience, which should be used to guide students. Students today are clued in to the world around and teachers are just the medium for students to process this information and come up with relevant outcomes.”

Finding his Soulmate In 1997, Vyas met Shimul Mehta, an accessory designer and alumnus of the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. Hands on designers both, they tied the knot soon after. Today, she heads the Outreach Department in NID and is a senior faculty member of the Accessory Department at the Gandhinagar campus. Ananya, their 11-year-old daughter, studies in class VI. It would seem that she has inherited her parents’ creative genius—illustrations done by her prove her artistic leanings. March 2012 EduTech

PROFILE

Pradyumna Vyas

Making a Mark Over the next two decades, Vyas headed all the different portfolios in NID’s Industrial Design discipline. And, he made it amply clear that he would walk that extra mile to pursue contextual and sustainable design projects for social development. He set great store on innovative pursuits, firmly believing that it plays a major role in a nation’s development. One of his inventions is a minimobile, a three button simpler version of the feature-rich mobile, aimed at empowering parents to contact their wards in school while ensuring that the device is not misused on the campus. “Schools are increasingly banning students from carrying mobiles because of its nuisance value. I designed a low-cost cellular phone capable of speed dialing only three pre-recorded numbers. It makes use of a special filter that recognises the pre-fed numbers.” A second version of the mini-mobile permits nine pre-determined numbers to be dialled, or to dial-in. Sadly, the product found no commercial takers in spite of being widely hailed in the media. Still, it attracted telecom major Nokia to set-up research centres at the Ahmedabad and Bengaluru campuses of NID. “These centres are hubs of activity, where students work on new contextual applications for the flourishing Indian telecom market.” Other innovative products from Vyas’s stable include LED traffic lights and a lifesaving drugs storage device, a one litre capacity photovoltaic cell (solar) driven cooling device.

Taking India Abroad Vyas believes in the importance of design promotion and makes it a point to organise design events in the country as also on representing the institute and India in exhibitions held nationally or internationally. The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID), a non-profit organisation formed in 1957, to protect and promote the interests of the profession of industrial design, brings designers from over 50 nations on one platform. Vyas was elected an ICSID executive board mem-

EduTech March 2012

opinions “In 14 years of married life, I have witnessed Pradyumna’s ability to genuinely connect and interact with people at all levels both within the institution and externally. His ability to do so effectively, his humane approach to dealing with situations and his positive nature stand out a mile!” Shimul Vyas (Pradyumna’s wife) Mentor of the Lifestyle Accessory Design (LAD) Department and Activity Chairperson for Outreach Programmes at NID

“I feel blessed to have had the opportunity to collaborate with Pradyumna Vyas during the two years when I was working at CIIE–IIM Ahmedabad. Vyas’ leadership style is subtle, he guides juniors without being overbearing, and always takes people with him. As a designer, he is always open to ideas and to finding the best solution, which makes working with him a pleasure” Nilay Shah Nasik-based designer

ber for a term running from 2009 to 2011. Elucidating the need to go global, he says, “Instead of borrowing technologies that have worked in the West, we need to look inwards. Traditional Indian value systems endorse

sustainable design. The cottage industry espoused by Gandhi was completely sustainable. Driven by human energy, it has zero carbon footprint. The world is thinking on these lines today, when Gandhi demonstrated decades ago the path of sustainable design, inclusive growth, and the pitfalls of consumerism. To take up these rich traditions and strengths globally, we must first hone them at home. And, in this endeavour, education can be the trigger to shift the thinking that would improve the quality of life for those at the bottom of the pyramid.” Vyas does not ascribe to mentorship and he uses his appreciation of Gandhian thought to explain his contention. “I have always believed that self-belief is the strongest support to navigate life. Somehow, the idea of mentorship comes across to me as using a successful person as a crutch. I place more emphasis on understanding of the self, analysing ones strengths and weaknesses, and moving on. Of course, we can gain from reading about the thoughts and life of exemplary personalities.”

Big Designs for Design Vyas’s stature as an Indian industrial designer par excellence has grown manifold in the two decades he has been with NID. In 2009, he was appointed to the institutes’ top job. Now director of the country’s foremost institute for design and a respected designer in his own right, he is called upon to add value to endeavours aiming at promoting design for industrial development. In pursuance of the National Design Policy established by the Cabinet in 2007, an India Design Council was constituted in 2009. The Ministry of Commerce & Industry, Government of India, nominated Anand Mahindra as the President and Vyas as the Member Secretary. The Council is working to launch an ‘India Design Mark’ to further good design practices in the country and guide consumers. “We are working with Japan on this project, since it has a strong design selection system and its own standard, the G-Mark,” shares Vyas. Being of the firm belief that design will play an increasing role in product differ-

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PROFILE

Pradyumna Vyas

(Clockwise) 1.Familyman: Pradyumna Vyas, Director NID with daughter and wife Shimul Vyas, Chairperson, Outreach Programmes at NID 2.Designer: At a design event organised at NID 3.Educator: Adressing the students at NID campus; seen here with NID faculty on the dias

entiation as well as in determining social and economic progress, Vyas sees the need to correct the mismatch between the number of designers that are presently being churned out in India and the number that could help take the profession to new heights. “While the country is producing 400,000 engineers and 100,000 managers per annum, only 4,000 designers are being turned out; whereas there is a need for 10,000. We aim to fill this lacuna by launching four new NID campuses during the 12th Five Year Plan—in Jorhat, Assam, Hyderabad, and two other venues that are yet to be finalised, in the states of Haryana and Madhya Pradesh.” NID is also exploring ways to effective-

EduTech March 2012

ly integrate modules on design in technology and management courses in association with CII and FICCI. “Presently, management, technology, social science and design education exist in silos. Ideally, students should gain a holistic perspective on these subjects.”

Reaching Out NID is also exploring platforms to share understanding gained during its 50 years of existence with neighbouring countries, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, and other SAARC nations. With this aim in mind, Vyas invited Her Majesty Ashi Sangay Choden Wangchuck, the Queen Mother of Bhutan, to participate in the Golden Jubilee

celebrations and 32nd Convocation Day, in December 2011. Now, he looks forward to leading product development collaborations between the institute and African nations. Zimbabwe promises to be the first beneficiary of this exchange. Recent recognitions for Vyas’s contribution to design education and promotion include the conferment of an honorary masters degree by the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham, United Kingdom and the award for outstanding contribution to Design Education at the second Asia’s Best B School Award held in Singapore. Indeed, for a career that took off by chance, not by design, this design maverick has done exceedingly well.

VIEWS, REVIEWS & MORE

Lucknow Boy: A Memoir This remarkably candid memoir from an influential editor gives readers an insight into an exciting life and a ringside view of political happenings Vinod Mehta is one of the most respected editors in India, known for his honest and outspoken style. It comes as no surprise to anyone, then, that his memoir Lucknow Boy, has both these qualities in abundance. So what can one expect from the memoirs of a man who travelled the world, met celebrities and often found himself in the middle of controversies? Carrying the burden of so much to talk about, the book nevertheless lives up to expectations. When dealing with his personal history, Mehta has not shirked from turning the mirror on himself, even when it shows an uncomfortable truth. One extract from the text says, “My daughter must be in her mid-40s now, probably a mother, which makes me a grandfather. I have no idea where she lives, what she does, what she thinks of me. I have often tried to imagine her and in this reverie I have prayed that perhaps through some happy accident our paths might cross. It hasn’t happened yet.” The first part of the book is dedicated to his early years as an army

“I know that one editor’s ‘public interest’ is another editor’s ‘motivated leak”’ Vinod Mehta

brat—thus a ‘Lucknow Boy’—and friends and family generally. These subjects are handled with affection and sensitivity, giving warmth to the book. From these regular beginnings and after a less than stellar academic performance, Vinod Mehta heads out to London. These were formative years for the young man as he devoured the English press, refined his perspective on international events—and of course, had the occasional fling. In 1970, he made his way across Europe and the Middle East (with a group of hippies headed for Goa) to return to India. Perhaps the most eagerly awaited parts of the book deal with the many vagaries of his professional life. Coming from a man who has been at the forefront of journalism in India, every incident holds intrinsic value for readers. The book also delivers a sense of being part of the inner circles and gives the reader a delicious sense of being a fly on the wall. People expect wit, scandal, gossip and insight—and they are not disappointed. Mehta recounts with zest how he was wooed and then sacked by various media houses as editorial freedom clashed with political pressures. There are gripping accounts of his encounters with personalities from the worlds of politics, business, films and the media, including Shobhaa De, AB Vajpayee, VS Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Sonia Gandhi. Author: Vinod Mehta Publisher: Penguin Viking Price: Rs 499

New releases for your BOOKSHELF Courageous Leaders

The Innovative University

The book takes a deep look at burning

Innovation is disruptive. This book shows higher education the ways to tackle these disruptive forces, and provides nuanced insights into traditional university and how and why they must adapt to these changes through practical analyses of Harvard and BYU-Idaho. Author: Clayton M Christensen and Henry Eyring Publisher: Jossey-Bass; 1 edition (July 26, 2011) Price: $21.75

issues in education: financial and academic viability of traditional, campusbased education and the need for a comprehensive look at alternative approaches such as online education, credit and examination systems, etc. Author: Dr John Ebersole & William Patrick Publisher: Hudson Whitman Price: $7.99 (e-book); $11.99 (print)

EduTech March 2012

timeout

gADGETS Tech Insider | Mala Bhargava

Ultrabooks: The Stylish Notebooks All through this year, you’re likely to hear a new term in the laptops department: Ultrabooks. With netbooks, notebooks and tablets already causing enough confusion, we didn’t need a brand new category to add to the mix. But the PC industry really needs it as it comes under assault from mobile devices and begins to lose market share. And so it was that Intel came up with the term Ultrabooks to describe thin, light, fast, stylish notebooks running, of course, Intel’s own latest processors. You, the consumer, gain because you get a host of new choices which, hopefully, will begin to get affordable in a few months as one of Intel’s specifications to manufacturers is to keep the price down. The first of the snazzy new Ultrabooks arrived earlier last year, but a whole host of them were showcased at the Consumer Electronics Show in January this year. Ultrabooks have no hard disk. They use instead flash storage. This makes them as responsive as tablets, booting up immediately or resuming at a touch. They also have wonderfully long battery life—not less than five hours, and in some cases up to nine hours. The inspiration for these Ultrabooks is not just necessity but Apple’s MacBook Air. Under the Ultrabook umbrella, other companies are now scrambling to come up with stylish designs. The HP Envy 14 Spectre, for example, is all glass and gloss. It uses the same ‘Gorilla Glass’ you find on smartphones. Lenovo has come up with an Ultrabook, the Yoga, that folds in half to become a tablet. Because there is no hard disk and therefore no moveable parts, the weight can be maintained at a nice light 3.1 pounds. When combined with the new Windows 8 operating system, these devices should be a joy to work with.

Mala Bhargava is Editorial Director at 9.9 Media and a technology writer. She is also the author of That’s IT, a regular column on personal computers in Business World.

Lenovo Hits Home The Lenovo IdeaPad Y570 is a solid home entertainment laptop which is good for casual gaming as well. It has the right mix of hardware and features to deliver better-than-average performance compared to other laptops. Price: Rs. 49,900

Another Star in Galaxy Samsung is all set to launch another Honeycomb-based tablet in the Indian market. The Galaxy Tab 680, which is popularly known as Galaxy Tab 7.7 globally, to refresh your memory, runs on Android 3.2 Honeycomb and sports a 7.7 inch Super AMOLED Plus display with 1280x800 pixels resolution, 3 MP rear camera, 2 MP front camera and 5,100 mAh battery. The device has a 1 GB of RAM and is powered by a 1.4 GHz dual-core processor. It has a 16 GB of in-built storage. For connectivity, the device supports WiFi, 3G and Bluetooth. Price: Rs. 35,499.

February March 2012 2011 EduTech

legacy “When you recruit a lecturer, you recruit a potential professor”

Professor Gurbakhsh Singh A True Visionary

Important Dates (1920-1998)

rof Gurbakhsh Singh (b. March 27, 1920, Multan [now in Pakistan]), worked with Prof RB Woodward (Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1965) for his PhD, which he obtained in 1949. He published high-quality papers with Prof Woodward. Prof Singh returned to India in early 1950s – joined NPL, Delhi as a research scientist. After a brief stint at Hoshiarpur as research chemist, he was appointed professor and head of the chemistry department, Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in the year 1959. He served there till September 1974. Prof Singh built up an excellent research and teaching laboratory in the department which could compete with the other advanced laboratories abroad at that time. In 1974, Prof Singh was appointed Officer on Special Duty (later as the vice chancellor) to start the new Central University at Hyderabad, the first Central University to be located in the southern part of the country. As the founding vice chancellor of the University of Hyderabad (UoH) in 1974, with a view to building an outstanding university with national and international visibility, he laid a strong foundation for the growth of UoH with his vision, dedication and hard work. He had a strong, genuine dream of seeing the University of Hyderabad become one of the best universities and he therefore attracted a large number of renowned teachers and researchers in all disciplines. With such distinguished faculty members, his ambition to establish UoH as one of the best academic institutions was realised. Within three decades of its inception, the university is recognised as a leading institution for research and teaching in the country. He used to say: “When you recruit a lecturer, you recruit a potential professor”. After completing his term as the vice chancellor at UoH, Prof Singh returned to BHU in March 1980. Soon after, he was appointed vice chancellor of Delhi University (1980-85). Prof Singh was a committed teacher, researcher and an excellent human being; he was also a very kind-hearted and unassuming person. It must be mentioned that he always liked to teach and never missed any class even when he was busy with administrative schedules. His major objective in his life was to build excellent educational institutions of national and international fame and do service to mankind. People who were privileged to have been associated with this great son of India, will testify that Prof Singh indeed succeeded in achieving his objectives reasonably well and they will remember his contributions forever. Prof Singh was married to the noted classical singer, Dr Bhupinder Sheetal, professor at the department of music and fine arts, University of Delhi, who breathed her last on November 21, 2011. Prof Singh passed away on January 10, 1998.

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EduTech March 2012

1949 PhD in Chemistry 1950 Returns to India 1959 Appointed Professor and Head of Chemistry Department, BHU 1974 OSD and later Founding VC of UoH 1980-85 VC, Delhi University (The article has been contributed by Professors Kalidas Sen and D Basavaiah & Professor Ramakrishna Ramaswamy, VC, University of Hyderabad on a special request by EDU team)