This topic – of inviting foreign universities to start operations in India – has been a recurrent theme for a couple of decades in discourses on HE in India. Recently, UGC has announced guidelines for foreign universities. There were some earlier attempts also to invite foreign universities, which did not pan out. Let us see how the current scheme will pan out.
In this note I want to share some thoughts on what can be role of a university set up in India by a foreign university, and what may be the key requirement for inviting such universities. Let us first be clear that what is being envisaged is establishing of universities in India (presumably by some act) – though the university will be “Owned” by a foreign university and will likely bear the name/brand of the foreign university. But the university established in India will have to be a full-fledged university in its own right – operating as per its act and rules and regulations (and laws of the land).
But why should we as a country invite foreign universities to start universities in India. The reason is essentially the same as for other sectors where we allow foreign companies with expertise to start operations – to satisfy some local demand and to provide some long term benefit (e.g. by improving the overall functioning of the sector, developing talent, bring in new practices, etc.) At a concept level, when private entities are allowed to establish universities in India, there seems little reason to disallow a foreign university to start a university. In fact, it can be argued that as the foreign university is in the business of academics, it may be a better entity to start a university.
Let us start with what are our needs for which we would like to invite foreign universities. I see two main needs.
First is to help satisfy the demand for good quality higher education. While we have a huge HE system and pretty much anyone who wants to do higher education can get admission in some college (in Engineering – the supply of seats seems to be more than the demand), there is an acute shortage of good quality higher education. Of the 40000+ HEIs (including universities and colleges) that provide HE, maybe 10% can be considered as providing good quality education (many will argue that only about a 100 do so). In other words, while there is an ample supply for HE seats, seats for good quality education are in extreme short supply. This leads to people with means sending their children abroad for undergraduate studies. It also leads to extreme competition for qualifying for these few good quality seats (whether in government institutions like IITs/NITs/IIITs or in private institutions providing high quality education like BITS.) One clear expectation from foreign universities is that universities they establish will provide good quality education, thereby expanding the availability of such opportunities in India. (The current UGC guidelines discuss the quality of education at some length.)
The second need we have is to have more good quality researchers and scientists, i.e. good quality PhD graduates. PhD graduates are needed for our expanding HE system as well as for progress and growth in the emerging knowledge based economy. There is no doubt that in future lack of good quality researchers will hit the country in many ways – as expertise and capability to create and leverage knowledge is increasingly becoming critical in many sectors. And there is a huge shortage of PhDs of decent quality in our country. The result is that most of our HEIs have faculty without PhDs – something we are unlikely to see in universities in US, UK, Australia, Europe or even China, where most faculty for HE have PhDs. So, the second expectation from a foreign university should be that they will have a substantial PhD program. (The current UGC guidelines do not dwell upon this.)
Just combining these two key needs, I would suggest that the goal of having universities established by foreign universities is: provide high quality education at UG and Masters level to as many students as possible, and produce as many PhDs as possible.
An interesting observation is that these two needs are quite different from financial perspective for a university. While education (UG or Masters) generates revenue for universities, PhD programs are cost centers – PhD students are given stipends across the world. With these two goals with financially different implications, it is possible to simplify the criteria for allowing universities to be started by foreign universities. We need to simply require that the locally established university must have some percent of its students as full time PhD scholars (say 20% of its students must be PhD students).
The implications of this requirement are many – mostly desirable. First, a foreign university that agrees to this condition is likely to be a good research university in its own country (e.g. those who belong to R1 category in US or those who are ranked high in some of the global rankings). Such a university will never compromise on its brand and will ensure that the quality of education and PhD training. So detailed rules/guidelines for guarding quality of education may be redundant.
Second, having a substantial PhD program will mean that most of its faculty will have to have PhDs. This will ensure a good quality faculty as these universities are not likely to dilute their standards for research faculty. This will further ensure good quality education.
Third, a large PhD program will necessarily means more research output from India – this will help further improve the research standing of the country as well as have some local problems researched (most foreign research universities, if they do research in India, are likely to more interested in working on unique challenges provided by the context.)
And finally, supporting a PhD has many cost implications. PhD students have to be provided with stipend and other support for research. Faculty to guide these PhD students have to be compensated well (and university cannot operate by having most faculty as part-time.) This will ensure that the university cannot easily become a “profit making entity” as a good portion of the surplus that may be generated from education programs will necessarily go in supporting the PhD program. This can address a concern that some have in India that foreign universities will come here only to make money. And it also provides value for strengthening our overall HE system by developing future faculty, making us more “aatmanirbhar” in future.
So just by requiring a substantial PhD program, not only will we achieve both the goals of good quality education and development of research manpower, some of the other perceived risks are mitigated. And so, with this as the key requirement, other requirements / regulations / rules can be minimised and the university can be given a freer hand in developing. This is also a requirement that can be easily verified (unlike any requirement on quality of education / faculty, or even financial issues.) To my mind, any regulation / guideline for establishing universities by foreign universities should make this as the central objective, and then provide them maximal freedom in operating.
While in India we often debate whether to allow foreign universities or not, I believe the main challenge in having foreign universities set universities here is to actually attract good universities to come to India. Why should a good research university from US, UK, Australia, Europe, … come to India to start a university? Each university which wishes to start a university here will have to provide its own answer to this question, which is likely to be a combination of financial aspects, access to talent, making an impact in the world, global branding, etc.
Financial viability is clearly going to be a prime concern – a foreign university establishing the university is not likely to view it as a philanthropic activity, so it will want to ensure that the university, at a minimum, is completely self financed in the long run – both in capital expenditure and on recurring front. This itself is a huge challenge as just the initial cost of land and establishing a campus itself can be very high. And globally (including in India) most examples of high quality private universities are those where the initial capital was provided by philanthropists. Here maybe some local philanthropist(s) can partner with foreign university for establishing the university. Making the university self sustaining on the recurring front is challenging but is possible (most private universities achieve this.)
Then there is the issue of the parent university benefitting financially from their venture in India. This may not be feasible for a decade or more of establishing a university as generating a surplus after covering initial capital is going to be challenging in India. Eventually when the university can generate sufficient surplus, the parent university will want to benefit from it. To support this interest in a transparent manner, it can be useful if Indian rules permit some remittance of royalty (I am not clear on what is the current position of GoI on this). As and when surplus is generated, they can be used to benefit the parent university in other ways also e.g. sponsoring research projects and PhD students, supporting faculty movement between parent and Indian entities, etc. In the short run also, the parent university can stand to gain financially by becoming a bigger brand in India which can lead to attracting students to its parent campus, having some twinning programs, etc.
Even if the university is financially self supporting, and even if the parent university benefits somewhat financially, I feel financial incentives will not provide sufficient motive to establish a university. And indeed financial gains should not be touted as the main attraction for foreign universities to set universities here (as has been done in some oil rich countries.) The foreign university will need to have other compelling reasons to come to India. These can be access to talent, to contribute to global development, to have an academic research base in India to address the research challenges faced in countries like India which are often different than those faced in developed countries, become a global brand in HE, … etc. Finding the right purpose(s) of establishing a university locally is beyond the policy / regulations etc – and will involve deep discussions with universities who are willing to at least explore the possibility and some local stakeholders, including the government. But if some good universities start universities in India with the condition stated above, it will be a good thing for the Indian higher education.
As discussed in the previous post, when normalcy returns, it is likely that hybrid teaching will be the dominant method for teaching some types of courses. As explained in previous post, in hybrid teaching, the lecture is given to the in-class students, but is also simultaneously streamed to online students, and the taped version is made available to all students. So, students can attend a lecture in-class or online – i.e. some attend in-class and others attend online. There are many advantages of hybrid – for the students, for the faculty, and for the institution – the previous post discussed a few.
In this post we discuss how hybrid teaching is done, based on personal experience. I will also share some feedback regarding how online and in-class students view hybrid lectures.
Mechanics of Hybrid Teaching and Equipment Needed
How is hybrid teaching to be done? We assume that for teaching, the faculty member is ready to use a projection-based system for the class (and not a whiteboard with pens.) It should, however, be added that in a large class in a university or college, projection based methods for teaching are the norm (cannot really use a whiteboard for a large class). In advanced courses also, presentation based approaches are now standard. And during covid times, even for courses where white board style may be preferred (e.g. Maths), methods have been evolved to use projection-based approaches (e.g. using a tablet with a pen).
In the in-class mode of teaching, a faculty member projects the screen of her laptop/devise to the class. The screen may show some slides (e.g. powerpoint), an interactive terminal on which she may draw or write, videos, documents, website etc. For audio, for a large class the standard method is a collar-mike which was connected to an audio system to carry the voice to students in the class; for smaller classes, there may not be any audio system.
To teach in hybrid mode in such a class, one straightforward method is to share the laptop screen on the streaming platform (e.g. zoom) being used for online students, and also project the screen in-class through the projection system. I.e. in the class room, the zoom screen is being projected. In this approach, it is best that video from laptop camera is projected only at the start of the lecture, but otherwise is disabled – so when the faculty member moves around the class the online students don’t see a blank.
Audio needs more thought. For in-class, the regular collar-mike with audio system can remain. But how do you stream your lecture to online students. I had tried using a Bluetooth earphone with a microphone – but the sound quality of that was not good (they are designed more for listening rather than speaking; also, with earphones listening to students in-class will get harder, besides looking funny going around in them in the class.) I finally just used the laptop’s microphone for steaming the audio, and laptop speaker for listening to online students. It worked well – there was no feedback from in-class audio to the online students and online students were able to hear clearly. I was also able to listen to online students. It, however, restricted the physical movement to a couple of feet around the laptop. I have since learned that there are Lav microphones available for connecting to a laptop – they are just like the collar mike with a wireless transmitter (which can be kept in a pocket), and a receiver that can be connected to the laptop using USB. They tend to be somewhat expensive though.
Initial Experience in Hybrid Teaching
This semester (Jan-April, 2022) I was teaching a large class with about 300 students on “Introduction to Programming (Python)”. It is a core course meant for students of all programs. When the course started, it was entirely online. We used zoom as the platform for online lecturing. For presentation to students, I largely used powerpoint, but also some interactive websites to show execution of programs, as well as a Python editor to type and run programs. I.e. the presentation to students was a mix of slides, websites, and an interactive window of the editor running on my laptop.
When about 3 weeks were left in the course, the covid situation eased and campus was opened to students. We surveyed the students regarding whether they will like to continue online for the rest of the semester or prefer to come in-class. About 70% said that they will prefer in-class. Given that a large fraction wanted to continue online (many were living in places far away from campus, some even overseas), I decided to try the hybrid mode. This became a “natural experiment” in which some students who till previous week were attending lectures online and are now in class for the same course with same instructor (something which will be hard to force in a designed experiment).
First learning from this experiment was about in-class attendance. While 70% of the students had voted for in-class, actually only about 30% of the students finally came physically to the class – the rest continued to attend online. (The actual numbers were – appx 70 students in-class and appx 150 students online). So, it was clear that while students wanted to be in-campus, they did not necessarily want to be in-class for lectures – the convenience of attending from their place of residence/hostel was strong. (The course was scheduled at 830 am, which may also be motivating some students to attend the class from their hostels.)
We took feedback of the two categories of students separately – those who were in-class and those attending on-line. (For taking the feedback, I used a mobile app called ALT (for active learning-teaching), which I had been using throughout the semester to take student feedback – so both in-class and online students were able to give the feedback.) I just took feedback on one question:
Question to online students: Today’s online class in hybrid mode – how similar/different from fully online class (Green: Better, Yellow: Similar, Red: Worse).
Question to in-class students: How will you compare your lecture understanding (incl all factors like attention, sitting, …) in the in-person class as compared to online. (Green: In-class is better; Yellow: About the same; Red: In-class worse)
The feedback from online students is shown in the first pie-chart below. As one would expect, most (about two-thirds) found the hybrid similar to the fully online. Very few (˜5%) found it as “worse” – perhaps my movement in class may have made audio a little worse. Surprisingly, about a fourth of students found the lecture “better” – this is counterintuitive, but there is a possible explanation: most faculty get energised with students in the class which can improve the quality of their exposition; maybe the presence of students in-class improved the lecture quality.
Feedback from on-line students
Feedback from in-class students is shown in the pie chart below. The vast majority (three-fourths) found in person better than online – this is to be expected as students who *chose* to attend the in-person class probably did so because they did not like the online ones. Quite a few found no difference – perhaps also to be expected as there are studies indicating that (for college students) learning online is comparable to learning in-class. There were quite a few students who found it “worse” – clearly these students will prefer online classes for their learning, if an opportunity is given.
Feedback from in-class students
Though this is small experiment, it does suggest that for a course like this hybrid teaching may be suitable: some students seem to prefer online over in-class for their learning and many find online similar (so a good fraction of these students will, due to convenience, attend many classes online), and hybrid lecturing may have a beneficial effect on the quality of online lecturing as well. Besides these, there is a significant advantage of recorded lecture being available (in another feedback on what helped students learn well, “recorded lectures” was consistently mentioned as an important factor.) Hybrid teaching may also enhance attendance in classes – we know from experience that students miss lectures often, and towards the end of the semester the attendance often falls dramatically; online option may encourage many of these students to attend more lectures. Plus there are other advantages of hybrid teaching, as discussed in the previous note.
Overall, hybrid teaching seems to work smoothly. And this initial experience indicates that it may be a good method of teaching a large class, perhaps better than fully online or fully in-class.
Now that familiarity with online is widespread and accepted, given some of its benefits like convenience of attending remotely, having taped lectures available later, etc, it is unlikely that higher education will go back to fully in-person teaching and attending of courses. At the same time in-person has its own advantages, particularly in assessments, and is an approach that has been refined over centuries in higher education. So, that will not be given up. What seems to be emerging as a consensus is that hybrid teaching will be the predominant method going forward. In a few posts, starting from this one, I want to discuss what Hybrid Teaching is and its potential.
What is hybrid teaching? In hybrid teaching, the lecture (or tutorial) session is given to the in-class students, but is also simultaneously streamed to online students. So, students can attend the session in-class or online – some attend in-class and others attend online. Implied in hybrid is that there will be some in-class assessments – maybe the major exams – where all students will be required to come in-person for proctored assessment, with maybe exceptions made for special students. And that given the session is being streamed, they will be recorded made available to all students.
It should be pointed out that blended education – the other term that is often used – generally means something slightly different. It is about using different forms of teaching (in particular online and in-class) for different portions of a course/module. I.e. the same set of students experience both the in-class and online portions. So, some parts of the course may be delivered online, while some parts may be in-class. The blended model has been around for some time, particularly for degree/diploma programs for working professionals who cannot attend classes in-person (before Covid, the non-in-class portion took different forms like distance education approaches where material is sent to students to read, online MOOC content, etc.) In this note, we will focus on hybrid teaching.
Standard Hybrid Model
Hybrid teaching seems a natural extension of regular in-class teaching where computer-based projection methods (e.g. PowerPoint, writing on a tablet, …) are used to present to the class, except that lecture sessions are also being streamed and part of the class is joining online. It can also be viewed as an extension of regular synchronous online teaching where the faculty gave lectures from their office or home and students attended online, except that the lecture is being given by the faculty from the classroom.
So, hybrid teaching is a natural extension of the two forms of teaching with which faculty and students have become very familiar and comfortable – in-class teaching and fully online teaching (with scheduled classes and lectures being streamed to online students). This makes it easy to adopt by students as well as faculty.
And given that it permits benefits of both online (e.g. students can attend classes from anywhere) and in-class (e.g. deeper connect of students with instructor, proctored assessments), there are compelling reasons to use hybrid teaching going forward, particularly in higher education. Let us discuss some.
First provide a definition of hybrid teaching. We will focus on teaching of a course (or module, subject, …) where a faculty member is responsible for teaching a class of students some subject, typically over a semester. Hybrid teaching of a course is where: (i) Most sessions (lectures, tutorials, …) during the term are delivered live to the students as per a declared schedule, (ii) Generally, these sessions will be delivered in-class in front of the in-class students, (iii) all lectures are streamed online allowing students to join the session online, (iv) the live sessions will generally be recorded and made available to enrolled students as reference / study material for this course offering, and (v) some assessments are proctored and conducted in-class for almost all students.
This hybrid model has some clear advantages from students’ perspective and can facilitate learning. First, if a student lives far away from campus, and happens to have only one or two lectures in a day, the student can save time and effort (and money) for travelling to attend the lectures, by joining them online. This saving of commute time can provide the student with more time for revision, other learning tasks. It should be added that in a large metro like Delhi, students living off-campus often spend 2 hours or more in commuting each day they come to campus.
Second, if a student misses a lecture for some reason, the recorded lecture is available for learning/studying. This is extremely beneficial as all academics know that students miss classes all the time for a host of reasons (including illness, getting up late, some student events going on, family event/function, etc.). Without recorded lectures, a student has to take notes from friends or other sources for missed lectures. While there are potential risks (primary among them that many students will choose to attend most classes remotely which can have adverse effects on students without them appreciating it), it is clear that hybrid teaching, due to its naturalness, low cost, and the benefits to the students will be demanded by students.
There are other advantages of this form of hybrid teaching. It will allow larger classes to be handled more efficiently. Often due to lack of class room of sufficient size, a large class is divided in sections – with each section having its own instructor who gives the lecture. While this may provide “smaller” classes, often even this size is quite large, and if the size of a section is more than about 100 or 150, the benefit of “smallness” is minimal. Furthermore, having multiple instructors for the same course throws up many challenges as different instructors may move at different pace, have focus on different topics, and may have different styles of teaching – making the learning experience for students of different sections somewhat different for the same course – which is not desirable. It may be mentioned that many universities in US have for long been scheduling large classes in smaller classrooms while making taped lectures available. The hybrid mode actually improves on it – besides having the recorded lecture, students can also attend the class in realtime online.
This hybrid model can also be leveraged to increase the reach and inclusiveness of higher education. It is easy to see that with hybrid teaching, it is easy to offer a course to people who are not enrolled as students in the institutions where they are being taught. This allows, for example, working professionals, including teachers in teaching-focused HEIs, to easily attend some courses from some high quality institutions being offered in hybrid mode.
Many HEIs (e.g. IIT Delhi, IIIT Delhi, IIIT Hyderabad, …) actually have such provisions to allow working professionals to take some courses as “casual students” – where they are not working towards any degree and attend the courses to upgrade their knowledge. These casual students attend the course, just as regular students do, and they get a certificate on completion of the course. The provisions of casual students did not gain much traction with working professionals in the traditional in-class lecturing mode, due to travel overheads, necessity of missing some classes due to other professional reasons, etc. With hybrid not only there is no commute involved (so the casual student only has to plan in her schedule for the scheduled sessions of the course), as recorded lectures are available, missing some lectures, which are bound to happen for a working professional, can be easily made up.
Having professionals attend courses can be quite attractive both for the HEI and the working professionals, particularly for advanced topics – the working professional can upgrade her knowledge and skills under the guidance of expert faculty, and the institute offering the course can generate additional fee as well as increase its engagement with industry and other academic institutions. This potential of expanding reach to professionals is a compelling reason for most top institutions to teach most of their advanced courses in hybrid mode, and actively engage with industry and other educational institutions to take advantage of it.
Generalized Hybrid Model
We have been discussing what can be called as the “standard” model of hybrid – which is really defined from the perspective of students attending the course – i.e. students can join a session in-class or online. The model can be generalized, by also allowing “hybridness” from the perspective of faculty also. This can be done by relaxing the condition (ii) in the definition to: These sessions will be delivered in-class in front of the in-class students, or online, by the instructor. That is, instead of requiring “most” sessions to be delivered in-class by faculty, it allows sessions to be delivered online by the faculty (in which case, even though the lecture can be projected in-class, there will be little point for a student to come to class and it will become online for all.)
With this more general model of hybrid teaching, some new possibilities emerge for improving education.
One, when the instructor is not able to come physically to the class (is sick, some family exigency, attending a conference, …), instead of cancelling the lecture and arranging for a make-up, can give the scheduled lecture online (with suitable notice to students). This can minimize disruptions and provide an additional degree of freedom to the Instructor.
Two, having guest lectures in a class becomes very easy. In an in-class approach, an instructor had to invite the guest lecturer to come to the campus and deliver the lecture to the students. Now, these sessions can be given online by guest lecturers from anywhere. This is hugely empowering – instructors can get some top experts from anywhere in the country/world to deliver a lecture on a topic of the guest’s expertise in their course, they can invite industry experts to give lectures on topics relating to how the subject is used in industry, which can hugely enrich a course, etc.. Besides, enabling students to be able to listen to lectures from these top academic or industry experts, it can also facilitate collaboration between faculty, and guest lecturers, which can have other advantages.
Taking this general hybrid model further, some courses in the curriculum can be taught mostly online, e.g. all the lectures are online. (Other conditions of hybrid will still have to be satisfied, i.e. some in-class assessments.) This will allow an HEI to get some expert from anywhere in the world to teach a course to its students – something that is extremely challenging in the in-class model. Many institutes have distinguished alumni who are experts in academia or industry in organizations across the world. They may be able to tap this talent and have them offer some courses – an idea with huge potential. Of course, this may not be limited to alumni – HEIs can request faculty / experts from other organizations to offer courses in their institution.
This aspect of hybrid can really allow tapping of teaching talent and expertise globally. Many academics across the world will be happy to do for a fee, particularly during their Sabbaticals, during which they may be unwilling to come physically to the HEI but may be willing to teach remotely. It also opens the possibility of leveraging retired faculty from various countries, or retired experts from industry – who may design and offer a course after retirement – they may even agree to offer to teach the course to many HEIs. There are clearly other possibilities that can be constructed. In this model of hybrid teaching, the in-class assessments to be done (e.g. exams) can be done. For example, the remote instructor can set the exam questions and the HEI where the students are taking the course can conduct these assessments in a proctored environment; the answer scripts can be shared with the remote instructor in a variety of ways, or graded locally under the guidance/supervision of the remote instructor.
Another possible advantage of general hybrid teaching can be in having courses jointly taught by faculty from multiple institutions. In this model, a course (e.g. an advanced course) is designed by some faculty from different institutions together. It is then offered to students of those institutions as regular elective course. In this model, in each institution where the course is being taught, some of the lectures will be taken by the local faculty member involved (probably in-class), but some lectures will be given online by faculty from other institutions. This requires the course to be scheduled at the same time in the different institutions. In-class assessment poses no issues. An example of this type of course offering done during the fully online times is the course offered by colleagues from IIIT-Delhi and IIIT Hyderabad on AI for Software Engineering.
Summing Up
Overall, one can say that going forward hybrid teaching is the natural course for most higher educational institutions. It has some clear advantages for students, and so HEIs can expect a demand from students also. It has also many advantages for institutions and faculty. In addition to the advantages, there are a host of possibilities that emerge that can help an HEI improve its education significantly by innovatively tapping the general hybrid teaching model. I expect hybrid teaching to become a norm in most forward looking institutions soon at least for some types of courses, and which other institutions will be forced to adopt later on.
In the previous two posts, we discussed how programs are designed, and how courses within the programs can be designed to provide a high-quality learning for students, leading to graduates with well-developed graduate attributes. While design of the education program, and the courses within the program, indeed form the foundation of good quality education, for their expectations to be realized, they must be executed properly. In other words, courses must be taught effectively leading to good learning as per the course outcomes by the students in the courses. Effective teaching leading to good learning requires extra care to be taken by teachers, and there need to be systems in the university to support and encourage effective teaching. Over the previous decades, there has been a sharper focus on effectiveness in teaching which leads to the desired learning. The NEP also suggests importance of universities to give attention to the teaching-learning processes to improve the learning outcomes of students.
Any system to deliver high quality output requires not only the people involved in the execution to perform their tasks as expected, but also needs feedback and quality systems to maintain and improve the quality – the law of entropy will ensure that if effort is not spent in properly administering the education delivery system, it is likely to decline in quality. There are a number of approaches universities can employ to improve the quality of teaching – here we discuss some approaches which universities can employ to help improve teaching, based on experience at IIIT-Delhi.
Teaching and learning at the university level has been an active area of research for a few decades. Many traits and practices have been identified of excellent teachers, and of effective teaching. While some people may naturally have talents to be an effective teacher, it is now clear that there are some methodologies (e.g. active learning, project-based learning, etc.) that facilitate learning which instructors can learn and apply. It is also now clear that for a teacher to be effective, he must have decent understanding about students’ learning processes and styles, and student motivation, besides understanding the principles of course design and basics of teaching.
Even if the faculty member has knowledge about the course, it is essential that faculty be trained in methods and technologies for effective teaching. While a few decades ago this was not appreciated, this is now widely accepted, and most large universities have established teaching and learning or teaching excellence centers. These centers, besides doing research in effective teaching and learning, offer training programs for faculty on becoming a more effective teacher.
As the importance of high-quality teaching is also increasing, and many universities value teachers that are recognized as good, certificates programs on teaching have also evolved. Faculty development programs for improving teaching effectiveness have been generally found to be quite effective. Often the centers within the university may offer certificates. But there are also externally offered programs on this (one such program for teaching the teachers on effective teaching for Computer Science is the CSEDU program in India.)
Feedback loops are central to improvement of any system – indeed even maintaining the current level of quality requires feedback and continuous adjustment. For improving the teaching there needs to be systematic feedback loops and actions taken based on the feedback for improving learning. There are multiple purposes for such feedbacks. For teachers teaching a course feedback can help understand if they are proceeding as they planned, and that the teaching approach, speed, etc. is suitable for the current set of students. Feedback is also needed for the overall course, as course design cannot be static and its design cannot be assumed to be optimal – only with feedback can the design be improved – to either address deficiencies in design or to accommodate newer developments. Even the design of the program cannot be assumed to be optimal, and should not be static – hence feedback is needed on the program. Finally, the teaching learning methods being employed by faculty can always do with improvement – so feedback to understand the effectiveness of the approaches used by different teachers will help.
There are some many feedback instruments universities use – for example, end of the course feedback from students is a standard in most universities. For different types of feedback, different approaches or questionnaires may be used. Here we discuss the methods used in IIIT-Delhi for different purposes using structured questionnaires (with some open-ended questions) – they are likely to be similar in spirit and style to approaches used elsewhere.
Peer review of course design. Most standard courses in a program will have a design specifying the learning objectives, syllabus, and assessment plan – the design would have been finalized through a process of discussion and review. However, it is desirable to provide some flexibility to instructors to adjust the topics covered, the assessment approach, etc., since even for a standard course, some amount of evolution is desirable. If flexibility is provided to the instructor to modify the course design, it is desirable to ensure that changes are appropriate, and that the plan for course delivery by the instructor is sound in that it will deliver the learning outcomes and will assess them well. Given the autonomy and responsibility granted to the faculty for administering and running their courses – a freedom that is desirable and aligns with the faculty ethos – any approach for this has to be consistent with this ethos. Peer review of course plans is the feedback loop that attempts to achieve a balance. In peer review, the plan for a course by an instructor is reviewed by a peer (or a group of peers). The review comments are not meant to be an official record and are only given to the instructor. The institute only ensures that peer-review has taken place, and so a record that it has been conducted is to be submitted. As it is review by peers, it is a constructive exercise of improvement, with no threat of it becoming an assessment.
Mid-semester feedback. The usual end of semester feedback on courses (discussed below), as collected after the course has finished, can only be used for improving the future offerings of the course and is of little value to the student enrolled in the course. To get feedback on the current course offering so any adjustments that may be needed can be made, an early mid-semester feedback instrument is employed – this is an online survey of students about a few key aspects of the course: the pace, the difficulty, ability to understand, and anything else the instructor may want to ask. The goal of this is to provide the instructor feedback on the current course teaching, so she can adjust it suitably, based on the inputs. This feedback is not an administrative instrument in that the results are not recorded or used for assessment – it is meant exclusively for the instructor and to help her adjust the course. So, only the instructor receives the feedback, which she is expected to summarize to the class and the actions she plans to take, if any.
End of Semester feedback. Most universities have end of semester feedback for courses. The main purpose of this feedback is to assess the quality of learning achieved by the student, the quality of teaching by the instructor (as perceived by the student), and get suggestions for improvement. Experience suggests that it is best to ask students precise questions that they can answer, rather than asking them summative questions (like: how good was the instructor, or how much learning did you have). Hence, it is desirable to have a set of questions regarding teaching, and a set of questions regarding the course and learning, and the student feedback on these be combined into aggregate scores to assess teaching and learning. Student evaluation of teaching has been found to be reliable and stable and useful for improving teaching effectiveness.
Course summary. Student feedback, it is known, is not an accurate reflection of the level of learning or the quality of teaching. Students are often biased and let other factors color their replies. As is the general wisdom, that while student feedback is an important input, it has inherent limitations. To address this and get a holistic view of the course, for each course a course summary is prepared by the instructor and the teaching assistants. This summary also provides information about any special efforts and initiatives employed by the instructor to improve learning, any tools used, any other special practice, etc. This short summary provides the instructor’s view about teaching. The information in this summary, when combined with the student feedback, can provide better insight on what are the practices that may be helping in students’ learning. This can be used to determine “good practices” and “teaching innovations” that faculty colleagues have employed that seem to be helping in making teaching more effective. These can then be shared with other faculty as “lessons learned” – these can help transmit the effective practices more widely.
Feedback from graduating students, alumni, recruiters. To get a broader student perspective, a feedback can be taken from students at graduation time. These students have a full perspective of the education program, and also have a sense of what helped them during their job interviews or their graduate studies applications. The focus of this feedback is more on overall program and learning experience (as well as other aspects of student life), and what can be done to improve it. Unlike other feedbacks which focus on a course, this is a more comprehensive feedback and taken once a year – inputs from this can help in deciding changes in the overall program.
In addition to these, feedback can be taken from the recruiters about the strengths and weaknesses they observe in the students. These inputs provide valuable feedback from employment perspective. However, it should be recognized that this perspective is often too narrow and focused on the objectives of the organization for which recruitment is being done. Hence such feedback cannot be taken literally, and any changes that may be suggested from these feedbacks must be supported by other needs and arguments.
Faculty members will often align their efforts towards what is perceived as valued by the Institution and their profession. In quest for research excellence, balance between teaching and research is sometimes lost in favor of research. There are some concerns that teaching has not been valued sufficiently by some universities. Given the importance of teaching, there is a need to ensure that the message that teaching is important is communicated to the faculty. And along with it a message needs to be given to the students that teaching excellence is their right and not a favor by the highly accomplished faculty.
There are established methods by professional bodies and societies to recognize and reward research excellence. There are prestigious awards, which often also have a financial incentive, to recognize great contributions in research. There are also prestigious fellowships established by professional bodies and societies which recognize research excellence. And, of course, there are research funding schemes which provide grants for good research. Research contributions also get recognized through citations, invited seminars, keynotes, etc. All in all, there are many ways in which contribution to research is rewarded and recognized.
On the other hand, such channels are very few for teaching excellence. There is a fundamental challenge in this also – while research output is in public domain which the professional community of peers can assess and so can judge if the contributions over the years are worthy of recognition, such approaches are generally not possible for teaching excellence. Teaching is visible only within the university, and that too largely to students (and indirectly through their feedback and inputs to others). Hence, it is hard for professional bodies to establish teaching excellence recognition and awards. Consequently, for recognizing teaching excellence, the university itself will have to identify and recognize it – something it does not have to do for research excellence, where it can rely on professional bodies. Recognizing teaching excellence through awards and prizes are now widely practiced in universities.
There will clearly be many ways to identify teaching excellence. Whatever method is employed, it must involve inputs from the students, as teaching is finally about learning by students. Here we briefly describe two schemes that are used in many universities, including IIIT-Delhi.
As hundreds of courses are taught each semester in a university, and feedback is taken in each of the courses, one approach to recognizing good teaching is to recognize and reward instructors based exclusively on the student feedback on courses. Such recognition can be given to the “top few” instructors in each discipline. For recognizing the top few, besides the feedback from students, other information can also be incorporated in the selection process – for example, size of the course, difficulty level of the course, innovations tried in the course (which are captured in course summaries), student comments, etc. This method has a drawback that it relies too much on the student feedback, which is known to be not completely impartial.
A sounder approach can be to identify teaching excellence by taking inputs from the graduating students and/or the recent alumni. These groups of students have seen the entire program and a range of teachers and hence are in a better position to identify those teachers who they consider as having done the best job of helping them learn. These students also should also not have any “hidden agenda”, as they will not be taking any more courses and will not be facing the faculty in future. One approach for identifying recipients for teaching excellence awards as decided by graduating batch (and/or alumni) is to have a process of nomination by the students, followed by subsequent voting. (This is the approach followed at IIIT-Delhi.) This method of recognizing teaching excellence has the drawback that as people tend to remember recent courses more, instructors of courses taught towards the end of the program are likely to have an advantage. This can be alleviated by having separate categories for awards – some for the foundation courses, some for the core or compulsory courses, some for electives, etc.
Another way to respect and promote teaching excellence is to have workshops for sharing “good practices” internally in the university. Recipients of teaching excellence awards, or those faculty who are trying some innovations in their teaching, can be invited to share their experiences and what they do with others. These workshops not only help in disseminate the good practices, they also help message that teaching excellence matters, and for respecting those who have been recognized as excellent teachers. It also supports bottom-up innovation in teaching which has been argued as an appropriate way to motivate and improve teaching and learning, with the workshops providing the platform to connect and share effective innovations and strategies across different disciplines. These can also provide inputs for top-down policy making regarding teaching excellence, as well as for refining the modules that teaching excellence center offers to faculty.
Most degree programs are aligned to disciplines – you get a bachelor or a masters in some discipline like computer science, electrical engineering, economics, mathematics, etc. As discussed in the previous post, the overall curriculum of a UG program will generally ensure some amount of breadth and general foundations for development of general attributes, while the bulk of the program focuses around building competencies and knowledge in the discipline of study. So, a mathematics program will have many Maths courses, but also general courses on communication, writing, sciences, computing, etc., an electrical engineering program will have many courses in the various sub-areas of the discipline, and also general courses in Maths, computing, sciences, communication, etc.
This focus on discipline has emerged as response to the increase in the breadth and complexity of knowledge. It simply is not possible for a student to acquire a decent understanding and knowledge of multiple disciplines. However, over the years, the expertise has tended to become too narrow, and understanding and appreciation of related disciplines, which is needed for effectively working in multi-disciplinary teams, has declined. And while research and development problems in each discipline remain, the big problems that face societies, nations, and the world clearly do not align with discipline boundaries and whose addressing need expertise from multiple disciplines. To develop manpower which can help address these problems and in general have capability to work on innovations and complex problems which rarely fall within discipline boundaries, there is a need for developing manpower that has multi-disciplinary capabilities. (Though the terms multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary have different technical meanings, we use these terms interchangeably, as they often are.)
Some Approaches for Interdisciplinary Education
One approach for providing interdisciplinary education is the T model of education – a broad and thick foundation program which builds general capabilities (like critical thinking, communication, team work, etc.) but which also builds decent knowledge and vocabulary in disciplines that are also horizontal, i.e. which are applicable to multiple disciplines in practice today. These include computing capabilities, math capabilities, data science capabilities, use of common technologies like mobile, sensors, etc. To build a thick foundation of the T model, a good portion of the program then is used to develop these skills, vocabulary, and capabilities in many key disciplines. The rest of the program in T model is used to support disciplinary depth. In such a program less than half of the credits in a UG program may be disciplinary courses.
This model has been used widely, particularly in US universities, and in some institutions in India as well – where in a program for a degree in some discipline, still a majority of the credits may be used for courses outside the discipline.
While this approach helps develop capabilities and vocabulary for graduates of different disciplines to potentially be able to communicate and interact and work together in teams, it is not sufficient to develop graduates where a graduate of one discipline can meaningfully engage with issues and knowledge of another discipline.
It is clearly not possible for someone to have expertise in many areas. However, it is possible to develop a limited expertise in another field, while developing expertise in one field. This leads to the pi model – a broad based foundations with depth in two fields. This leads interdisciplinary programs and degrees – where expertise in two fields is developed.
Even with two disciplines, given that each discipline is vast and intricate in itself, there is a challenge that such a program may end up developing shallow capabilities in both disciplines. This is undesirable in the world where deep knowledge and expertise is valued and needed. To avoid this problem, the goal of an interdisciplinary program should be not to develop equal strengths in two disciplines, but follow the 80-20 rule, i.e. have strong depth (say 80% of what a graduate with only that discipline will have) in one discipline, and 20% in the other. This provides depth in one discipline, and foundations and knowledge of the second discipline which can allow a person to meanifully engage with experts of the other discipline and also develop depth later, if desired.
One standard approach to allow students to develop pi type capabilities is to allow the student option of doing a minor in another discipline. A minor requires the student to do a small number of courses in the minor discipline, which the students can often do using their open elective credits for them. A minor provides a decent understanding and capabilities in the minor discipline, as well as a basic vocabulary of the discipline. It is a common way to allow the student to develop some capabilities in another discipline, without having to spend extra time in the education program. Most universities provide for Minors.
Another standard approach is to allow students the option for a second major. Generally, requirements for both the majors will have to be satisfied. Usually, credits for a course can be counted towards requirements for both majors, if the course is permitted in both the majors. As there may be many common requirements, or courses that can be included in both majors, the additional credits required to complete the second major may not be too large, particularly if the two majors have many courses in common. So, generally second major will require the student to do only some additional credits to complete the requirements for the second major, particularly if the two majors are such that there are commonalities leading to cross-listed courses.
These two are flexible approaches which leave it entirely to the student to decide what type of interdisciplinarity he / she wishes. But each program is designed independently of other – and hence has at best follows the T model with focus on the discipline. In such an approach, while a student does courses from different disciplines, most courses remain discipline oriented, thereby requiring the student to connect the knowledge from two disciplines herself. In other words, in these approaches, there may not be any genuine interdisciplinary course, i.e. a course that will be considered as a valid disciplinary course in multiple disciplines.
Truly Interdisciplinary Programs – CS+X Programs
Another way to approach interdisciplinary education can be to provide actual interdisciplinary programs, which are designed as such. In this, the programs are designed and curated properly and a student may choose to enroll in them – so philosophically they are quite different in approach than the concept of double major or minor. Interdisciplinary programs have been increasing in the recent past.
The big challenge in having multi-disciplinary programs is, of course, that the size and duration of such a program may become too large if a simplistic view is taken that such a program should be a combination of two majors. If the design of this interdisciplinary program has to fit in the overall credit requirements of programs (as discussed above), then the key challenge is how to balance the need to complete the program in the defined time (or credits), and provide multi-disciplinary capability, without diluting the capabilities of the disciplines. There are many different types of interdisciplinary programs possible depending on how the curriculum is structured and taught. Here we discuss the approach taken at IIIT-Delhi.
Clearly for such programs, the disciplines being combined have to be chosen carefully. When considering which two disciplines to combine for such a program (more than two is clearly not feasible), the disciplines should be such that they develop complimentary skill sets which collectively will be more valuable and sought after than only skills of one discipline for a range of jobs and careers. Further, the disciplines should also be such that each is not so “vast” that combining them into one program is simply not feasible. At least one discipline should be such that even with a small set of courses, reasonable skills and knowledge can be developed and which can help in improving the capabilities of other discipline also. Few disciplines will satisfy this – computing is one of them.
Computer Science (CS) is a young discipline. However, with easy and cheap availability computing power, its use has become ubiquitous – there is hardly any discipline or any sphere of life which is not directly affected by IT. That is why computing is sometimes considered as the “new physics” – it is useful in all disciplines and its basic knowledge is essential. Today, in every discipline, knowledge of computing is an asset, and there is a demand for professionals in various disciplines who also have decent knowledge of computing.
CS is in some ways a simpler discipline. It is fundamentally about algorithms, software, and systems. Hence, education programs in CS focus on these – for software, there are courses like programming, data structures, software engineering, etc; for algorithms there are courses on data structures, algorithm design, theory of these, etc; and for systems, there are courses like architecture, operating systems, networks, etc. Generally, a subset of these topics forms the core (or compulsory) part of an undergraduate program, allowing for a relatively small CS core. And these core courses, along with a few specialized courses, can provide a strong knowledge and skills to students to apply computational techniques.
This ability to have a small core to teach decent amount of computing to a student which he/she can apply, renders CS for interdisciplinary programs which combine CS basics with knowledge of other disciplines. And given the need for knowledge of computing in many disciplines, having an interdisciplinary program with computing makes a lot of sense, particularly since further progress in many disciplines is highly dependent on application of computing. A good example is biology – earlier it was considered an experimental discipline. But now, without the use of computing, many aspects can simply not be done (e.g. anything to do with genomics requires huge amounts of computing.)
In fact, many senior computing academics have argued that while computing as a discipline must evolve, computing must get more tightly integrated with some disciplines to have more impact of computing for society and other sciences. This is another reason for having interdisciplinary programs with CS. So, there are interdisciplinary programs being launched with CS and other disciplines – these are sometimes called “CS+X Programs”. IIIT-Delhi has launched a series of such programs. UIUC and Stanford have their own such programs. The discussion here is based on the thinking and experience of IIIT-Delhi.
One such program is CS and Applied Maths. The basic motivation behind this program is that for solving problems for complex systems as well as for big data, both mathematics and computing tools and techniques need to be applied. Hence, an engineer with training in both will be better prepared to handle such problems. Another program is CS and Design, which aims to develop graduates that are not only well versed with computing approaches, tools, and technologies, but are also experienced with design approaches and new media technologies and uses and prepare students to work in the IT industry as well as digital media industry like gaming, animation, virtual/augmented reality, etc. CS and Social Sciences is another program which aims to develop IT engineers with strong understanding of relevant social science disciplines as well as their methodologies. There is also the program in CS and Biosciences – need for this is easier to establish, as there are many masters and PhD programs already in the field of computational biology and the need for knowledge of the two disciplines for solving problems in biosciences is well established.
There are some guiding principles while designing such programs. First, the set of core courses for the disciplines chosen for the interdisciplinary program should be minimal, i.e. have the core as small as possible. Interestingly, it is possible to do so – as what constitutes a core is subjective and when the program is not for one discipline but tied to another, the core can be reduced considerably. Second, for electives for this program – courses from both the disciplines should be permitted, and a balance should be achieved. Third, some of the courses taught in the program should be interdisciplinary in nature.
Typically, in IIIT-Delhi, in any such an interdisciplinary program, a student will do the basic foundation courses in first year, most of which are common for all programs. These include courses on communication, critical thinking, programming, mathematics, systems, etc. Then in the next few semesters, the student will do a small set of (about 6) core or compulsory courses in each of the two disciplines, which will provide the grounding in the two disciplines. In the last few semesters, the student will choose a few electives (4 to 6) from each of the disciplines. Broadly, such an interdisciplinary program can satisfy the requirements of a BTech in CS, as well as requirements of a 3-year BA/BSc program in the second discipline.
Such programs allow a student to pursue an exciting career in the intersection of the two disciplines, but also prepares the student to pursue higher studies and career in one of the two disciplines, as decent knowledge of both disciplines is provided in these programs. Many thinkers believe that interdisciplinary approaches for problem solving is where the future lies, as siloed approaches of individual disciplines are limiting and often unable to take a broader view of the problem and its context. Such interdisciplinary programs should help develop manpower which has the capabilities of at least two disciplines for problem solving. The NEP also encourages interdisciplinary programs, and explicitly allows programs to have a common core for general attributes, and have one or two areas of specialisation – thereby allowing disciplinary programs as well as interdisciplinary programs.
After the long covid break, I hope to start sharing some ideas in this blog. Starting with this article, will focus on education for a few articles – how to provide high quality education, i.e. delivering high quality learning to students.
Higher education was the original mission of universities, and remains as the primary mission today and manpower development through education is still the most significant and impactful contribution to society of universities, including research universities. The importance of higher education is also increasing – as the world becomes more complex and more dynamic & rapidly changing, businesses and societies are expecting universities to produce manpower that is adept at working with modern and fast changing technologies in an increasingly complicated world.
While access to higher education has increased in India over the years, particularly with the large presence of private players running affiliated colleges, the quality of education has declined. There are various reports regarding the poor quality of education being imparted in most of the HEIs leading to only a fraction of the graduates being employable. There are many reasons for the decline in quality, including narrow focus, lack of culture of research, old and outdated curriculum and teaching methods, uninspiring teachers, lack of quality governance and leadership, poor quality of faculty, etc..
In this post we discuss we will discuss program design, i.e. designing of a high quality curriculum for a UG program like a BTech program (the focus of the note is on designing UG program – though the principles apply to Masters also.)
I will later post an article on how a committee that I am chairing applied these concepts for design of AICTE model curriculum for CSE. I will also share some observations on curriculum design exercise of AICTE and the curriculum design exercise by the ACM – I happen to be in the steering committee of that as well.
Design of an education program should start from the objectives of the program – what are we designing the program for. We start the discussion with this.
Program Objectives
Design of the curriculum of a program starts with what types of careers or roles it is trying to prepare its students for through the program. We will refer to these as objectives of the program. Often these objectives may be common for a class of similar programs – e.g. BTech programs may have similar objectives, while BA programs (in social Science & humanities) may have different objectives. These objectives may be stated in terms of what careers a graduate may be pursuing immediately or a few years after graduation, and hence are influenced by the education the student receives. Long term career possibilities, while influenced by education, are perhaps much more affected by opportunities that a person sees during the early years of his/her career after graduating. The objectives of programs are influenced by the mission and vision of the HEI.
As an example, let us consider the BTech programs in IIIT-Delhi. The Institute has stated that its programs are preparing the students for careers in:
Engineering
Research
Entrepreneurship
Stating the education objectives as these careers has some clear implications on the program design. A traditional BTech program is often designed for engineering careers, and hence may focus mostly on developing engineering skills and foundations. With research and entrepreneurship careers also as the education objectives necessarily requires that the programs should have opportunities for students to develop capabilities for these careers also. That is, there needs to be courses, projects, industry interaction opportunities, etc. to support these objectives. Also, stating these as education objectives does not mean that students cannot choose to go later in other careers like finance or management (eg. by doing an MBA) – it only states that the education programs will be designed to support these stated objectives. With the overall objectives, specific learning outcomes for each of the BTech programs in different disciplines have to be defined – the outcomes should support these objectives. The learning outcomes of a program essentially define the attributes the graduates of the specific BTech program possess at the time of completion of the program, i.e. statements about the student’s capabilities at the time of graduation. They are commonly called program outcomes or graduate attributes. Let us now discuss these – clearly these attributes for a particular program should align with the objectives.
Graduate Attributes (Program Outcomes)
Clearly, program outcomes will depend on the nature of the program – so a BS in psychology will have different outcomes than a BTech in computer science which will be different from outcomes for a BTech in Electrical Engineering. However, universities aim to develop some common attributes or capabilities in all their programs, so graduates across different disciplines are expected to have some attributes that are common. These are sometimes called generic graduate attributes. These are skills and capabilities of graduates which are beyond disciplinary knowledge and often aim to develop the individual for being a responsible member of the society and develop skills that are transferable to different contexts.
With general graduate attributes, program outcomes can be divided in two groups: a general set of outcomes that apply to a family of programs, and a specific set of outcomes, one for each program. For many professional fields, professional bodies also specify graduate attributes, which they expect the degree programs to support. Often, having these attributes may be necessary for accreditation of the programs. As can be expected, these graduates’ attributes should be such that they will help in achieving the education objectives established by the university.
One common method of specifying the general attributes is to enumerate them as assertions about the graduates of the programs. For example, in IIIT-Delhi some of the general attributes for BTech programs are:
Ability to function effectively in teams to accomplish a common goal.
An understanding of professional and ethical responsibility.
Ability to communicate effectively with a wide range of audience.
Ability to self-learn and engage in life-long learning.
Ability to undertake small research tasks and projects.
Ability to take an idea and develop into a business plan for an entrepreneurial venture.
An understanding of impact of solutions on economic, societal, and environment context.
The general attributes play an important role in the holistic development of the student. Due to its wider and foundational importance, most good universities give careful attention to these outcomes. In India, often the education is too narrow with early specialisation thereby graduating students sometimes dont have strong general attributes needed for a good citizen. The new National Education Policy (NEP) of the government of India has articulated the importance for education programs to move from narrow discipline-based education only to one which is based on broader, more liberal education. The NEP envisages broad-based and multidisciplinary foundations to be provided beyond the disciplinary knowledge to develop well rounded students who have good values and cultural literacy, and general capabilities like critical thinking, problem solving, data analysis, communication, teamwork, social responsibility, etc.
While the general attributes are largely aligned to the broad goals of education, for a program in a discipline a fundamental goal is to develop competencies related to the discipline, which can lead to gaining productive employment. Typically, these discipline specific attributes are evolved by experts in the discipline with inputs from the end employers/users of the graduates. Most universities that have explicitly stated the program outcomes will state these on their websites. For example, some of the attributes the Computer Science program at IIIT-Delhi aims to develop are (in addition to the general attributes mentioned above):
Understanding of theoretical foundations and limits of computing.
Understanding of computing at different levels of abstraction including circuits and computer architecture, operating systems, algorithms, and applications.
Ability to adapt established models, techniques, algorithms, data structures, etc. for efficiently solving new problems.
Ability to design, implement, and evaluate computer-based system or application to meet the desired needs using modern tools and methodologies.
Understanding and ability to use advanced techniques and tools in different areas of computing.
As can be seen, these outcomes are stated mostly in terms of the discipline, and so are different for different disciplines.
Program Design
Once the program outcomes are specified, the overall program has to be designed for a degree program. This is a challenging exercise, as for many practical and educational reasons, each program is not designed in a stand-alone manner. Most programs are designed within some overall constraints imposed by the University, which are influenced by the mission, vision, and values of the university, as well as constraints of the college or the school to which the program belongs, which will generally require some common features in all the programs. Within the constraints, program design often comes down to decisions regarding:
General requirements. These are courses that all students in all programs need to take. These are largely driven by the general graduate attributes. They may be grouped in different sub-categories, and may even be divided among university-wide and school-wide general requirements. But the essence of these requirements is that they provide a common foundation to all students, based on which they can essentially do any program (and so program switching is easier), and which help develop some of the general attributes.
Program Specific requirements. These are what the specific programs, which are mostly discipline based, require. Some of the courses in these are mandatory for students enrolled in the program, whose goal is to deliver the core or foundational knowledge about the discipline, which form the basis for advanced topics in the discipline. These are often called program compulsory or core courses. Other courses are program electives, i.e., the student chooses courses on advanced topics in the discipline from the set of courses being offered (subject to the satisfaction of the pre-requisites for the course). These courses may also be grouped in different buckets with some requirements that students must take some number of courses from some number of buckets. Collectively, the program requirements of core course credits and elective credits, aim to deliver the program specific learning outcomes.
Open Credits. These credits allow the student an opportunity to take any (with some restrictions sometimes on some of the credits) of the courses in the university. This allows for students to gain a deeper understanding of topics of interest, which may not be from within the discipline of her program. It also encourages a broader development of student providing her with a breadth which disciplines, by definition, do not provide. And in limited ways, it allows a student to customize parts of her program as she wishes. These credits may also be used for having a minor in another discipline or doing another major. Due to these credits and discipline electives, most students will graduate with a transcript different from others depending on the set of courses they have done.
There are generally some constraints on the program design. First are the total credits for a program and credits a student can enroll for in a semester. Let us take a typical undergraduate program which can be completed by a full-time student in 4 years or 8 semesters. During a semester, a full-time student can be expected to spend a total of about 40 to 50 hours per week. This total effort puts a limit on the total number of credits a student can do in a semester, which in turn, puts a limit on the total number of credits in a program. While often no clear definition of credit is provided by universities, broadly credits are understood to have a relationship with the total effort the student is expected to spend. In other words, one credit should translate to some overall effort, including the time spent in lectures as well as tutorials and labs. This effort may be thought of as average in a week, or total in a semester, but should include all effort a student is required to put, including effort outside the class, which in many ways is more important for learning than the time spent in the lectures. Many universities have a standard credit for regular courses, with an understanding of total hours and lectures per week that are expected in a course. For example, most regular semester courses in many US universities are of 3 credits. In IIIT-Delhi, a regular course is 4 credits. Such courses are expected to have three lecture hours every week and an average total workload of 8 to 10 hours per week. This means that a full-time student can effectively take 4 to 6 such courses.
The above discussion indicates what is the maximum credit or load a student can take in a semester. Programs often assume that most students, if they study full-time, have the learning capability to finish an undergraduate program in 8 semesters. But, it is well known, that academic preparedness and learning abilities of students who enroll in a university in a program may be quite different. And while many students can handle this load, there are others who may find this level of full-time load hard to handle and hard to learn at the required pace for it. The approach in many countries, particularly in the west, for addressing this is to allow the student to take more than 4 years to graduate and take a load he may be comfortable with.
This approach, however, is unacceptable in countries like India where there is a strong desire to finish the academic program in the stipulated period. In such situations, by having fixed number of credits for graduation is tantamount to having a one-size-fits all approach. Such a model can indirectly encourage the university to pitch its courses at a lower level so all students can complete, or have to face the problem of large number of backlogs, which pose another set of problems. Hence, some flexibility in credits can be desirable, without violating the integrity or value of the degree.
One approach, that is used by IIIT-Delhi, is to pitch the main program for the regular student admitted to the Institute, and provide a “honors” option to those who are more motivated and can have higher levels of learning in their time in the program. With this approach, the credit requirement is such that for a couple of semesters a student can work with a slightly reduced load, which also allows a student to make up some courses he may not cleared earlier, and still graduate in the desired 4 years. At the same time, the “honors” student is required to do a few more courses and a thesis, and must have the graduating CGPA (cumulative grade point average) above a respectable threshold. Given the CGPA requirement, the option is made available to only those who have shown through their performance in first few years that they can cope with the course load, and are ready to take more learning challenges.
Within these overall parameters, the program for a degree in a university has to be designed. There are no rules for how many credits should be in each of the course categories, or which courses should be taught when. This is generally achieved through a process of discussion and iteration – often program design (or program refinement) may take over a year with different committees spending a considerable amount of time discussing and thinking and examining programs of other universities. Often workshops may be held in which external experts from other universities as well as relevant industry may also be invited to give inputs. Finally, the main academic body of the university discusses and approves the program.
A broad principle that is followed in many universities for their programs now is to keep the compulsory portion of the program as small as possible and allow a student more choices. This generally implies fewer credits for general requirements and fewer credits for core courses of the discipline, with more credits left for discipline electives, and open electives. It should also be pointed out that with more room for credits in the elective and open categories, possibility of providing for minors and second majors increase as often these credits are utilized to complete the requirements of minor or the second major.
How do we know that the program design is sound? The main test of the soundness of a program design is that it should, at a minimum, achieve the program outcomes and the graduates should have the established graduate attributes in them at completion of the program. As the program outcomes are qualitative statements on what the student has learned in the program and what capabilities she has developed, the assessment that the program delivers them also has to be done qualitatively. Generally, given the learning outcomes of each of the courses (discussed below), and the network of courses a student has to do in the program, it can be demonstrated that by achieving the learning outcomes of each of the courses the student takes, it will lead to the student achieving the program outcomes. Indeed, the course design is often influenced by the program outcomes in that the learning outcomes of a course are decided so as to contribute towards the program outcomes. How the network of courses satisfies the program outcomes may be shown in terms of tables showing which course contributes to which of the learning outcomes, and how collectively the set of courses deliver a program outcome.
Course Design and Learning Outcomes
Course design is a widely discussed topic in teaching and learning literature, as finally education for a program boils down to teaching in courses, as a course is the basic unit for learning in an academic program. Teaching of courses is also what teachers do – hence for improving education, the focus is often on teaching of courses. Due to the importance of courses in teaching, most books on effective teaching place strong emphasis on course design, as without a good course design, high quality teaching and learning is not likely in the course.
Often a course is designed by enumerating a list of topics that should be covered in the course – generally called the course syllabus. This is a very teaching focused approach, as the list of courses are often selected by the instructors based on their judgement regarding the importance of the topics. It is widely agreed that this approach, which is still quite prevalent, is not a sound approach for design of courses. To help ensure good learning in a course, the course design should be learning driven by first articulating the learning outcomes of the course, and then designing the syllabus and its teaching. Besides the learning objectives and teaching plan to achieve them, another basic aspect of course design is assessment planning without which the level of learning cannot be ascertained. An integrated course design then has three main elements, as shown below (adaptation from book by Fink):
Integrated Course Design
These three elements are strongly dependent on each other and reinforce each other. Weakness in one will compromise the eventual goal of the course – to ensure that the learning outcomes are satisfied by most of the students. For example, if the course delivery plan is not aligned to the learning outcomes (for example, does not cover all the necessary topics), then the student cannot achieve the stated learning outcomes. If the assessment plan is such that it focuses on assessing what can be assessed easily rather than what is stated as learning outcomes, then the students will align their learning towards the assessment rather than the learning outcomes, and the grades given to the student will not accurately represent the learning with respect to the learning outcomes. This again results in compromising the goal of teaching and learning in a course.
The design of a course, therefore starts from stating its learning outcomes. Learning outcomes are statements about the knowledge and capabilities of a student who has successfully completed the course, i.e. statements that assert what the student at the end of the course should know and what she will be able to do. The learning outcomes are critical in design of courses, as from these, it can be determined if the graduate attributes are being delivered by the program or not. The learning outcomes of the set of courses that a student does in a program should together ensure that outcomes of the program are satisfied. Hence, learning outcomes are not just what the instructor of a course decides for the course – they have to be aligned to the program outcomes, particularly for the compulsory or core courses.
Once the learning outcomes of a course are decided, then the syllabus of the course can be designed, along with the teaching and learning activities in the course. Generally, the most visible aspect of this plan is the schedule to topics covered in lectures. While this schedule of topics is sufficient to ensure that appropriate topics are covered for the learning outcomes, it is an incomplete plan for ensuring achievement of learning outcomes. For that, outside the lecture activities must also be included in the plan. While lectures can form the nucleus of knowledge for learning in a course, most of the learning by students happens in the activities they have to perform outside the lecture. Hence, these must be included in the instruction plan for a course.
Finally, there must be good assessment plan in a course. Assessment is an important and difficult aspect of teaching, and one that is often not enjoyed by teachers, as it is also generally cumbersome and time consuming. However, it is an essential aspect of teaching and learning. Without a proper assessment plan, the effectiveness of teaching cannot really be judged, and learning levels achieved will depend only on the student’s motivation and drive. Note that assessment does not mean only exams or tests – assignments, report writing, etc. can all be, and generally are, components of assessment. In fact, an assessment based only on formal tests/exams will be limiting in scope – it may not be able to test some of the learning objectives (e.g. ability to set up an experiment), and it also encourages students to spend most of their effort for learning around the exams. Hence, assessment plans often use multiple instruments which are spread throughout the duration of the course. The final goal of assessment is to determine the level of learning achieved by the student – which is often captured in terms of the grade the student receives.
Course design is a much-discussed topic – many books focus on this. Assessments also is a much-discussed topic with many books focusing only on assessment. Readers who want a deeper understanding should refer to these resources.
Summing Up
Design of the curriculum of a program is a serious and long exercise. It should normally start with discussion and agreement of the program objectives – for what type of careers the program aims to prepare the students.
The expected outcomes from a program are called graduate attributes – these are statements on knowledge and skills of students at the time of graduation from the program. These attributes should align with the objectives of the program. Graduate attributes are often grouped into two categories – general graduate attributed and discipline specific graduate attributes.
With the graduate attributes established, the network of courses to be taught to the student in the program has to be decided, such that together they develop the graduate attributes. Such a design generally will have some compulsory courses, some disciplinary electives, and some open electives.
Finally, the courses in the program have to be designed. The learning outcomes of the courses have to be such that each course contributes towards the learning outcomes of the whole program, and together the courses provide the learning outcomes of the program.
As can be seen that this is a complex and lengthy exercise. Often such an exercise will take a year or more with many committees involved in designing different parts of the curriculum.
An HEI needs funds to support its two primary missions – education and research (the third mission of directly contributing to society through innovation and entrepreneurship and outreach, which has also become quite important, often generate resources to support it.) Though of course an HEI has one balance sheet, it is important to separate the funding needs for the two functions, as well as support for these, as these missions have different goals and different revenue sources.
The NEP also envisages that funding for education and research is provided separately by different agencies. It envisages that there will be a higher education grants council (HEGC) which will provide the base funding to the universities. Its role will be to provide financial support for education and running the university, but not for research. The research funding is envisaged to come from the national research foundation (and other research funding organisations).
Funding Education
Higher education, of course, is a mission of all HEIs. Higher education is still a people-based service. It is largely provided by highly educated and talented faculty, who are supported by teaching assistants, lab staff, instructors, etc., who are also skilled personnel. Further support is provided by administrators and other specialised staff involved in managing education, other functions, and infrastructure of the university. Role of machinery, which is the main method of reducing costs in commercial production, is very limited in higher education. The costs of skilled human resources continue to increase faster than other costs, leading to an increase in the cost of university education globally, often at a pace faster than inflation. (This phenomenon is sometimes called the “cost disease”)
The main sources of income for a public university are grants from the government, tuition and other fees. A university also gets sponsored research projects – these are largely to support research projects and these funds are to be used for the purposes of the research project only, and generally cannot be used for salaries of faculty or for general infrastructure of the university. Hence, for education, government grants and tuition are the main sources of funds. (Other incomes like income from endowment, from other commercial activities, etc are generally very small in Indian context.)
The portion of the education cost that is provided by the Government (or through private sources) is the higher education subsidy. The rest of the cost of education is to be borne by students through the tuition fee.
As the cost of education is effectively covered through the tuition fee paid by a student and the subsidy provided by the government for education, generally in the form of yearly grants, the tuition fee has to increase with the decrease in subsidy. How much of the cost of education for a public institution should be provided by the government (i.e. subsidy) and how much of it should come from tuition fee is a matter of balance and depends on how the public views HE. The NEP is silent on the level of fee that should be charged in public institutions, though it does suggest that the private universities will be free to charge reasonable fee determined in a transparent manner and within some limits. For a private university, the subsidy is nil for the recurring costs (though there is subsidy in some philanthropically supported universities in that the capital costs may be covered by private funds), and may even be negative in that education may provide a “profit” which may then be used for covering other costs of the HEI – e.g. supporting research or infrastructure.
What should the government support be to an HEI for education, which will presumably come from higher education grants council (HEGC)? The yearly support provided for education is essentially to provide subsidy for education. The HEGC support and the fees collected should cover the salaries of all staff and expenses for the regular running of the institute. This can form the base funding for an Institution – through which it can comfortably discharge its primary function of education. How much funding the HEGC provides for subsidy and how much of the cost is recovered as tuition will probably depend on nature and location of institutions, and presumably there will be policies for the same.
It is important that this base funding (subsidy by HEGC + tuition fee collections) be sufficient for the HEI to discharge its education function properly, and conduct some research which is necessary for its education function. It is also important that this base funding has a minimal support for research focus – the funding for research must be viewed differently, and can be supported through national research foundation (NRF), as discussed below. This clearly defines the scope and focus of HEGC, and the HEGC then needs to only have competency in evaluating education system and does not need mechanisms and infrastructure for assessing research proposals and needs (which can be quite elaborate as it needs to involve all kinds of subject matter experts.)
Funding Research
The NEP recognises that in the modern world, heavy investments in research is essential to tap the economic opportunities of knowledge driven era, and notices that levels of research investment in India have dropped and are well below what other countries invest, and makes a case of increased investment in research and innovation. It recognises that in universities there is lack of funding for research, as well as a lack of research mindset, leading to young minds not opting for career in research or going overseas for such careers. It proposes establishing of a National Research Foundation (NRF) whose goal will be to strengthen a culture of research in the country, and which will fund research in universities using peer-review based best practices for competitively supporting good research proposals.
It should be realized that research is expensive. The costs can be daunting even without counting the cost of the regular faculty who lead much of the research but whose salary may be covered as part of the education cost. The research cost includes the cost of PhD students, staff hired specifically for the research project, labs and equipment, library facilities, travel support, fieldwork costs, administrative support needed for managing research projects, and so forth.
As research in universities is considered public good, most countries provide support for research in universities through funding agencies. (Some industries may also support focused research projects, although the bulk of the research in universities is funded through research funding agencies supported by the governments.) As research even from private universities is also public good like with government universities (generally, published in peer-reviewed journals), for support for research, both government and private universities should be considered at-par with each other, as envisaged in NEP (though is not the prevailing situation, where private universities are often handled differently for research funding.)
Any university engaged in research needs two types of research funding – project based, and general. Project based funding is where research projects are funded by funding agencies. This type of funding supports research endeavours on a case-by-case basis, and often also depending on the focus areas of importance as decided by the funding agencies. The project based funding is based on proposal and promise – the research results are to be delivered and for it funding is sought.
But research in an HEI is not all mission/project oriented – a good deal is completely exploratory and blue sky research. Such research cannot be supported well through projects. Also, projects also do not reward institutional excellence in research – they support individual (or a small group of individuals) for their work. To support institutional excellence and to encourage institutes to have more impactful research, general research funding is needed. This funding can be based on actual impact, i.e., based on performance and not promise.
NEP proposes a National Research Foundation (NRF) – which will be a research sponsoring body and will be in addition to the existing bodies like DST, MEITY, DBT, etc. As existing bodies also support project based research, besides increasing this quantum, NRF can make a major impact if it provides an impact based research funding support to HEIs also. This funding is to HEIs (not to PIs for projects), and is based on impact in previous years, and not on promise of research. Some HEIs end up doing much more impactful research than others – largely due to their culture and resources to support research. Impact-based funding will motivate and encourage such universities.
Assessing the impact of research for a university can only be done by considering the output and impact over a substantial period. Hence, this formula should not be applied on an annual basis. This exercise should be done every 5 years or so based on the performance of the university in the previous 5 years. The grant is given yearly; however, the level of grant is decided based on the application of the formula until the next exercise. Hence, universities can predict the research funding for a few years, which is hugely desirable because many research bets can take many years of investment before the results come and the investment pays off. (It may never pay off because research is fundamentally a high-risk activity with the chance of impact being very low.)
As this funding is based on research performance, it provides incentives to universities to improve their research. It also rewards the better performing universities, which can further help them improve their research and become world-class. Impact based funding has a strong advantage that the definition of impact is what is decided by the country, keeping its larger goals in mind. So, for example, impact in India can be a function of volume of publications, citations, technologies developed, impact on the society, impact on the innovation eco system, etc. With the impact measures defined, universities will try to achieve them so they can rank high in research impact assessment, and reap higher reward in terms of flexible research funding.
This approach is followed in UK and Australia. One hopes that with NRF, this will happen in India also – and besides project based funding, we will have impact based funding for Institutions. If this is to happen, we will naturally see emergence of strong research-universities, something as a nation we want and desire.
To end, NEP provides an opportunity to clearly separate funding for education and funding for research for universities. This is great for improving our HE system – the vast majority can be nudged to excel in education and the best universities can be motivated to excel in research and reach world levels. For providing support for education, excellence in education should be demanded – frameworks like accreditation etc are already in place for it and can be strengthened. Support for research should be for research projects, but more importantly also for impact of research, which will require frameworks for assessing impact of research like the Research Excellence Framework (REP) of the UK, or Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA).
The new education policy (NEP) was accepted last year. It has many desirable proposals for the higher education sector. In the next few posts I plan to explore a few different aspects of NEP for higher education (HE) and higher education institutions (HEIs). This one focuses on autonomy for self governance.
Universities are complex organisations trying to respond to the forces of globalisation, technology change, changing expectations from students and public, competition for global rankings and prestige, need for enhanced financial resources, and so forth. In such a scenario, the university must govern itself effectively to face multifaceted challenges of the twenty-first century and provide desired academic outcomes to students and society. For strong professional governance, a higher degree of autonomy is essential, particularly to research universities.
In public universities that are supported through public funds, the state exercises a degree of control over these universities. In many developed countries, it is now broadly agreed that increasing the autonomy of public universities is essential for a modern higher education system. Experience and research indicate that autonomy helps a university in performing better and attract more funds.
The NEP recognises the importance of effective governance and leadership and that a common feature of all world-class institutions globally including India is the existence of strong self-governance and merit-based appointments of institutional leaders. It states that over a period of 15 years, all HEIs in India will become independent self-governing institutions.
For autonomy of governance, the first issue relates to the Board of Governors (BoG), the apex body of an Institution. NEP states that the BoG will consists of a group of highly qualified, competent, and dedicated individuals having proven capabilities and a strong sense of commitment to the institution. It also proposes that the Board will be self-perpetuating, i.e. the BoG itself will find replacements for members whose terms finishes. It proposes that “new members of the Board shall be identified by an expert committee appointed by the Board; and the selection of new members shall be carried out by the BoG itself.” It is implied that the BoG will have none or very few government nominees (the NEP2019 document, which formed the basis for NEP had given a limit for government nominees.)
These recommendations regarding the BoG are indeed along the lines of the best practices being followed globally, and if implemented in letter and spirit, can truly transform the governance of Institutions. First, as the board appoints its members, it will help ensure that each member focuses on welfare of the institution and feels answerable / accountable to it. It also avoids having some government official / nominee in the Board – often such officials are on many boards and their aim is often to ensure that government’s interests are protected, not necessarily to promote the institution’s interests. Selection of members by BoG can also avoid the common situation where some Board positions remain vacant since the concerned ministry is not able to nominate people to the positions for which it has nomination authority. NEP also states that succession should be planned with care so leadership positions are not be kept vacant.
The NEP is silent on how the Chairperson of the BoG will be selected / appointed. (The NEP2019 had suggested that the Chairperson will be selected by the BoG itself from amongst its members.) If the government wants to have a say in this appointment, it is hoped that the selection of the Chairperson will be done through a committee comprising of the Government and the BoG nominees, and that the Board has some say in selection of the Chairperson. And that the Chairperson is appointed sometime before the term of the current Chairperson ends – it is not at all in the interest of the HEI that there be “acting Chairperson”. NEP clearly states that leadership changes should come with sufficient overlaps, and not remain vacant, in order to ensure smooth transitions.
It is also important to ensure that the Chairperson of the BoG has a non-executive role – clearly stated in NEP2019 and is implied in the NEP. In other words, any executive (e.g. the Director or the Vice Chancellor) cannot be the Chairperson of the Board. This is based on sound governance principle, and is globally followed in universities. It will be interesting to see how this is implemented for Universities in India, as many of them follow the old practice which the British established (but which is not followed in UK) where the Vice Chancellor is not only the chief-executive but is also the Chairperson of the Board.
The second important issue of governance autonomy is whether the selection and appointment of the Head of the Institution (Vice Chancellor or Director) rests with BoG or outside the BoG. A person appointed to a post is answerable to the appointing authority. Therefore, if the appointing authority is not the board of the university but some external authority, then, the Head is actually not answerable to the university or the board, but to the external appointing authority. To resolve this fundamental anomaly, the Head of a university, like the CEO of business organisations, should be appointed by the university through its Board and should be answerable to the university.
NEP appreciates the need to have top quality leadership (states that all leadership positions and Heads of institutions will be offered to persons with high academic qualifications and demonstrated administrative and leadership capabilities along with abilities to manage complex situations.) It states that the selection of the Head of the Institution shall be carried out by the BoG through a rigorous, impartial, merit-based, and competency-based process led by an Eminent Expert Committee constituted by the BoG. In other words, the selection and appointment of the Head of the Institution is to be done by the Institution itself through its BoG.
This recommendation, if implemented in spirit as well as the letter, can change the mindset and culture of institution leaders. It makes the Head answerable to the Board, the appointing authority. In today’s scenario, as the appointing authority is outside the institution the appointed leader is really answerable, and perhaps beholden, to the external appointing authority.
When the institution, through its Board, becomes the appointing body, many institutions will find ways to involve the faculty in the selection process. For example, a common method employed in US (and even in some places in India) is to invite the final few shortlisted candidates for leadership to the Institute and meet with faculty and often make a presentation to the Institute body regarding the vision the person has, the values he/she upholds, and what might his/her focus be as a leader. And based on these interactions/presentations, the faculty may give their input/recommendations to the Board, which takes the final decision based on all inputs. This allows all stakeholders of the institute to be involved, and more importantly, the new leader to be answerable to them.
The last issue regarding governance autonomy is of selecting and appointing faculty. Institutional autonomy clearly implies that all appointments made by the institute should be decided and offered by the Institute itself. NEP clearly states that the most important factor in the success of higher education institutions is the quality and engagement of its faculty, and that the current level of faculty motivation is lower than desired. It further states that autonomous institutions empowered to drive excellence, should have clearly defined, independent, and transparent processes and criteria for faculty recruitment, and suggests that promotion, tenure, salary increases, recognition, etc be based on performance.
Autonomy in recruitment, besides requiring that the government officials should have no role in the selection and appointment of faculty, raises a rather touchy issue, particularly for research universities / institutions that aim for excellence and want to be globally competitive and reputed. As their mission includes research and teaching excellence, these institutions should have the freedom to recruit suitable people to these positions based completely on their needs (e.g. in which areas) and excellence-merit/quotient of the candidate, and should have freedom to evolve policies and processes for tenure, promotion, etc based on performance – as supported in the NEP. If the criteria of merit and excellence is diluted for any reason, it is likely to take the institution down a slippery slope where factors other than excellence or performance become significant. This implies, that while the institution should adhere to the academic value of being open to all, it must continue to value talent, and talent alone. Any restrictions (e.g. quotas) on this actually impinge on the autonomy of the institution regarding selecting and appointing the best and most talented faculty to meet its vision and mission.
The NEP has laid out the path for modernisation of governance in HEIs, and has excellent recommendations to bring governance of our institutions in line with the global best practices. It is to be seen how the changes recommended by the NEP are implemented, as some existing rules and practices can come in the way (e.g. of having the Vice Chancellor as the chief-executive and also the Chairperson of the Board.) Implementing the NEP recommendations may also require dismantling of some existing structures (e.g. council for IITs, NITs, IIITs, …) which violate the autonomy of the Institution. The NEP says that there will be some overarching regulation/act which will fix issues. It will be interesting to see how such legacy issues are resolved.
Overall, the NEP has provided for great deal of governance autonomy to Institutions. Though the past record of governments and bureaucracies is that they are loath to give up their power and control – one hopes that the recommendations of the NEP will be sincerely implemented and our HEIs, at least the top ones, will get full governance autonomy as envisaged in the NEP.
This issue is of great importance for research focused institutions in India, as it is well known that most talented graduates who want to do PhD, move to universities abroad for pursuing it. While in most developed countries, graduates from top universities prefer to do PhD in other top universities in their country, in India, the graduates of top universities wish to go abroad for their PhD. In most top Institutions in the country, the PhD students do not come from top institutions – in fact, they often do not even come from the next set of institutions – rather they predominantly come from the set of institutions even lower. So, for example, in IITs, the PhD students not only do not come from other IITs, they often do not come even from NITs. It is also known that an extremely low percentage of graduates opt for doing a PhD (as discussed earlier in the note why more students need to do PhD and what can be done about it). Clearly, there is a need to have more graduates from better institutions doing PhDs in our country. If we can attract some of the graduates from our top 50 institutions to do PhD in these institutions, the level of research in these institutions can dramatically improve – as good PhD students not only do good work, they often also help the faculty in doing better research.
There are many studies about the students enrolled in the PhD programs – to better understand key aspects like time-to-completion, attrition, student experience and other related issues. While these studies help in understanding the PhD program, they do not help in understanding what motivates people to join a PhD program and what can be done to excite the brightest minds to take up a career in research by opting for a PhD. Developing countries like India have a special challenge in attracting students to PhD programs in its institutions, as many of the graduates from its best institutions who want to pursue PhD opt to do it in overseas universities, most of which attract meritorious foreign students to their PhD programs.
A few years ago, I had conducted an informal survey of students who were about to graduate from BTech and MTech programs in some of the IITs to get some data which may throw some light on the vexing problem of how to attract the best students to do PhD in Indian institutions. The survey was taken by about 275 students, of which about 160 were BTech students, and 115 were MTech students.
The students were first asked what they would prefer to do after graduation – a job, PhD, MBA, Master’s. As was expected, that the vast majority wanted to do a job after graduation. However, the interesting data was that over 15% of them said that they will like go for a PhD. This number was higher than what many people expected – as we know that overall the number of students going for higher studies/PhD abroad has been declining in this century – while till the late 1900s, inevitably the top 20-30% of the graduating batch will go for higher studies (MS or PhD) abroad, this number had reduced considerably in 2000s – largely due to the opportunities for well-paying jobs that the liberalised economy had created. The survey indicated that there is a desire in a substantial number of graduates from the top Institutions to do a PhD. As the empirical data suggested that few of them were choosing to go abroad for PhD – perhaps this meant that if they can get a suitable/desirable option to do PhD in India, they will choose it.
Interestingly, very few respondents chose the option that settling abroad was an attraction for doing PhD overseas. While experience – and some studies – show that most students from India when they do their PhD from universities in developed countries chose to settle in those countries, this indicates that at least before they have actually moved abroad, the attraction of settling out of their country is not a strong motivator. This again seems to indicate the possibility of attracting interested students to pursue PhD in India.
The survey asked the students why they may not want to do their PhD in India. The most common answers by students were:
Have not thought about the PhD degree and career options after it
Job options after PhD are few
Do not want to be an academician
PhD takes too much time
The first three are career related – these students do not understand what PhD entails and the career possibilities after PhD, and may be thinking that being an academician is the primary career (which many of them do not want to pursue). Traditionally PhD programs have implicitly supported the view that after PhD one should become an academic – after all the supervisor of the PhD scholar had chosen this path and is most familiar with the academic ecosystem. However, PhDs are now employed in a range of careers – some studies have indicated that more PhD graduates take up non-academic careers than those who take up academic careers. In applied areas like engineering, the share of PhDs opting for non-academic career is even higher, and in emerging technology/IT areas it may even be higher. Some studies indicated that in Electronics, less than 20% of the PhDs joined academia. At IIIT-Delhi, less than a quarter of graduates go for academics after graduation.
Globally, career pathways for PhDs are not well understood, and career counselling for PhD students is often non-existent in universities. To help motivate more students to join PhD programs in our institutions, we need to do two things. One, collect better data on career opportunities for PhDs in various fields – such data can be compiled relatively easily through surveys by professional organisations. This can help not only understand the career opportunities and the prevailing compensation levels, but can also be an important instrument for planning increases in PhD programs. Two, provide improved career counselling to PhD students. While the primary responsibility for this has to fall on the universities/institution, this can be supported by professional bodies and suitable internet based resources.
It is also evident, as one may suspect, that prospective students are afraid that PhD takes a long time. Globally the long duration of PhD is a disincentive for a young person, but more so in India where there is a societal and family pressure to “settle down”. Implicit in this fear is the uncertainty about the completion time – perhaps strengthened by the anecdotes of students taking years to complete and the jokes about the duration. One response to this is what countries like UK and Australia have done – fix the duration of PhD program. Globally this is not a common practice – how do you fix the duration of a program involving research which is inherently unpredictable. However, active measures can be taken to plan for and ensure that PhD can generally be completed in a defined period (say of 4 years, which, most students, consider reasonable), and only in special cases does the duration go much beyond that. (In an earlier note, a plan for doing PhD in 4 years in CS was discussed.) Policies can also support completion in a reasonable period – e.g. scholarships provided only for 4 years, and extensions given only after some assessment and in cases which were beyond the control of the PhD scholar and the supervisor.
A considerable number of students also agreed with statements relating to the research scenario in India. Many students hold views like: the Indian PhD has a low market value, the faculty do not inspire them for taking up higher studies, the range of research areas available in India are limited as compared to foreign universities, etc. These are larger research ecosystem challenges which a country like India faces.
The second issue which the survey asked was what options they would like in the PhD programs which would motivate them to consider doing a PhD in India. The main options that students wanted in the PhD program were:
If the PhD degree is jointly awarded by an Indian institution and a foreign university, with at least one year being spent in the foreign university
If the PhD program involves collaboration with R&D groups in companies, including internship in these firms
Two other career and compensation related options were strongly favoured: If the job opportunities after PhD provide a good compensation, and if the stipend for PhD scholars is increased.
These two options are actually quite reasonable, and they will actually also substantially improve the quality of the PhD programs. The second option (along with increased compensation) has been partly addressed in the PM PhD Fellowship scheme, which has indeed resulted in, as many colleagues have indicated to me, an improvement in the quality of PhD scholars.
The first option is also being explored by some universities. For example, IITD, IITB, IIIT-Delhi etc. have joint PhD programs with provision of spending time with the partner universities. However, there does not seem to be an appetite to support it nationally – there is still a prevailing mindset in officials that going abroad is for having fun/tourism and for making money. It is not appreciated how important in global science it is to be globally connected and be a part of the global network. If universities/institutions can be provided financial support to provide this option for their PhD students, like an overseas research fellowship, this itself can transform the PhD program and the intake can change dramatically in a short time. (More on such a scheme was discussed in an earlier article, which was carried by Hindu.)
This limited study shed some light in what may be the reasons why best of the minds do not come to our PhD programs and what can motivate them to do PhD in India. There is clearly a need for similar and bigger studies for students in sciences, social sciences, humanities and other streams. An improved understanding of what prospective students are looking for can help the education system design better PhD programs, which can attract better scholars, which can lead to an improvement in research.
This is another note in the series on PhD program in India. While the previous ones focused on the evolution and state of the PhD program, and what are desirable objectives and characteristics of a good program, this one focuses on PhD students. It first discusses what types of careers PhD students are hoping for and then discusses what PhD students can do during their PhD for a successful career after PhD.
Aspirations of PhD Scholars
What type of career do PhD scholars aspire for? In the current day, the range of careers has considerably broadened – besides academia, there are choices in industry, think tanks and policy groups, doing a startup, etc. In India, some of these careers still absorb few PhDs, but the industry is certainly become a destination for PhD graduates, particularly for those in technology.
A few years back, I did an informal survey of PhD students in CS/IT who were in their second half of the PhD program – i.e. they have a good idea about opportunities in their field, about what they want to do soon after their PhD. Based on the inputs we identified these as the primary opportunities:
Job in an industry R&D lab
Academic position in a research institution like IITs, some IIITs, etc (or overseas)
Do a postdoc abroad – after which (most likely) #2, or (less likely) #1
Academic position in a teaching focused institutions with some research (like some pvt universities and many other engg. Institutes and universities)
Teaching position with no/minimal research (like in a college)
NGO, think-tank, policy organisation
Join or start a startup / new venture
It should be clarified that these are students doing PhD in CS/IT – a very hot area with global opportunities, which also fuels global aspirations. While what these students desired may not be same as in other disciplines, it is easy to see that the top choices are likely to remain the same in other disciplines, though their ordering may change.
Almost all opted for option 1 or 2, with many of these choosing option 3 (which is by definition a temporary position) leading to option 2 or 1 mostly.) The overwhelming preference was for industry R&D, though a substantial number wanted to pursue the option of an academic position in an institution which has a strong research culture. Only one or two opted for option 4, and none opted for the others.
There are some clear implications of this. If the PhD program is good (IIIT-D’s PhD program is indeed extremely high quality), then it will produce decent researchers who will aspire to do decent research or at least deployment of research. Such talent will naturally look for working in an environment which focuses on research or research-led development. Hence the first two options are the predominant ones.
Even in good quality PhD programs, there will always be some PhD students who, while doing PhD, realise that they do not want to engage heavily in research – either because they don’t enjoy it or because they are not too good at it or because they enjoy teaching. However, their PhD training has prepared them for a good academic career – as not only do they have good subject knowledge, but also have the ability to keep track of and understand new developments in a field, and incorporate them in their teaching, and do limited R&D. A natural choice for such students is option 4. It is worth pointing out that these students also did not want option 5 – teaching only role as they wanted the ability to innovate in their teaching, and also do limited research.
It follows that the placement of PhD students for a good PhD program (in CS/IT) will help them fulfil their aspirations, i.e. most students will find opportunities in #1, #2, and #3, and some will go for #4. In IIIT-Delhi, it is indeed the case – the vast majority of students with PhD in CS went for industry careers (in leading labs in India), followed by a post-doc leading to an academic careers (students have joined as faculty in overseas universities, IITs). Some have taken academic positions in private institutes. Based on anecdotal evidence, it is clear that PhDs from places like IISc, and main IITs are also going for these options.
Sometime back in a few selection committees for full Professor in CS in universities which are not well known for their research, I asked the candidates about where their PhD students had gone after PhD. Interestingly, the profile was very different – most had taken up option 4 or 5. Universities and colleges in this category are looking for PhDs for their faculty (as it is often required or desired), but are unable to attract graduates from good programs. And graduate from non-so-good programs are unable to find options in category 1 or 2. So, such graduates become a natural fit for 4 or 5.
Capabilities to Develop during PhD
To launch a good career after PhD, i.e. get a good opportunity in the desired career track, what should a PhD student do during the PhD. How should he/she develop his/her background and CV during the four or five years spent doing a PhD. This issue can be viewed from a recruiter’s perspective: what is being assessed or looked for when a PhD graduate is applying for a position (academic, research lab, postdoc, …). Some of the key capabilities the potential employers of a PhD graduate (academia, research labs, postdoc positions…) looking for, and which PhD scholars should aim to develop during their PhD, are:
Decent research capability and record. The research capability is partly demonstrated by the research record a scholar has. The research record is about the quality and quantity of research done. The quality of research depends on importance and relevance of research problems the scholar has worked on, and the quality / depth of research results obtained, and the approach followed for conducting the research. As these are also the factors that publication venues (journals, conferences) consider, a decent proxy for the quality of research work is the quality of venues where the papers have been published, and is often used to assess the quality of a PhD scholar CV. Use of this proxy is relevant as the actual impact of research, as measured by citation etc, is time dependent and therefore is not really known for research of a graduating PhD. For research, as indicated by the papers published, a candidate with a few publications in top quality journals and conferences is likely to be considered stronger than one who has a larger number of publications but all in average venues. In fact many average venue publications with no top venue publication can be a source of serious concern. I am aware of many cases where candidates with very few publications have been selected unanimously, while those with large number of publications have been rejected unanimously.
Research statement, where asked, is an additional input about the research capability of a scholar as it indicates what type of work the scholar wants to pursue. A statement which indicates good understanding of the context, and good perspective on the the types of problems the person wants to work on in the coming few years is likely to be viewed positively.
Strong depth and scholarship in your area, and decent breadth. While publications are clearly important and necessary to demonstrate your research capability, a good understanding of the area and research problems, what is important and what is not, how the area is evolving and where is it going, etc. is also very important. This capability comes from deep scholarship, critical evaluation of the works in the field, and clarity of thought and communication. In other words, while a scholar may have worked on only on some aspects of some problem in an area, the scholar is expected to deeply understand the research results in the area and the body of work done in it. It is given importance as only with a deep scholarship can a person identify the gaps in knowledge to identify research opportunities. It is also useful for teaching, which inevitably requires a broader understanding of the state of knowledge in an area. In other words this capability reflects the potential for doing good research and teaching. Hence, besides building a good publication record, a PhD student aspiring for a research career, should also focus on developing deep scholarship and understanding. Depth of understanding comes out in discussions and Q&A about the person’s work – inevitably related questions will be asked and depending on how the scholar answers it, listeners (who are from diverse areas) are able to assess the depth of scholarship and understanding.
While depth in the problem area is essential, it is often not sufficient and a decent breadth of understanding of other related areas is expected – particularly for an academic career. Breadth can be indicated by the quality of course work – what types of courses one did in PhD (and Masters and UG), and other research projects the scholar may have been involved in. This has implications on how a PhD scholar views the course work. Some PhD students want to minimise the course work so they “can move on with the research work and complete the PhD” – that is taking a limited view of PhD training. For good training, while ensuring depth in the area (which may be gained while working on the research problems), breadth should also be developed by doing rigorous courses in related areas.
There is another very important reason to have breadth. Whether one enters a career in industry or academia one can’t survive today on the phD research problems for long, and every decade or so may actually have to move to other areas even – where there is more action, more funding, more excitement. Keeping track of developments in emerging areas and perhaps seeing the connections with the current work, may allow one to move to these areas more easily while leveraging the strength one has in the current area of expertise. Easiest way to do this during your PhD is to attend all/most of the research seminars in your department (dont miss a seminar because “the topic is not related to my area”) where you can even engage with experts to get clarifications and more information. Other ways are to engage with other PhD scholars and try to understand what they are doing, keep sometime every week for reading general articles meant for researchers in the broad discipline, etc.
Problem solving / implementation skills. Theoretical knowledge and research results are sometimes not sufficient, particularly if the area one is working in is applied. Very often, particularly for industry R&D positions, translational capability of leveraging research to evolve useful systems/practices/tools…. is being looked for. The reason for this is simple – research is a key driver for innovation, and innovation requires research knowledge to be put to practical use. Hence, even academia is now keen to ensure that knowledge created in research is also put to use. This implies, for example, that if one is working in the area of computer networking, then today just a theoretical understanding of networking and writing papers in it will not cut ice – it is expected that the scholar understands real networks and has experience in it, and if needed, has the capability to convert the research results into actual implementations or solutions. This skill can be demonstrated by having some component of the PhD thesis work which involves actual implementation or problem solving. It is also enhanced by having done other implementation projects – in courses, in Master’s thesis, internships, industry experience, etc., which shows handling reasonably complex and interesting problems and evolving solutions and prototypes for them.
Related to this is taking a systems view of the research work a scholar is doing and develop a good idea of where his/her research results may get applied. And for applying the research results in a system for solving some aspect, what may be the key limitations of the work, which often arise due to the simplifying assumptions made while solving some problem. This is critical for someone looking for a career in industrial R&D – scholars often have an understanding of the knowledge in the area but have insufficient understanding of how it may get used in larger systems for solving problems, and what challenges come when dealing with reality where many assumptions may not hold and new constraints may be there.
Communication and collaboration skills. These are extremely important skills. One can even say that without strong communication skills, one cannot really be a researcher. A researcher has to communicate results in a research paper in a sound and articulate manner so it is accepted and read. A researcher also has to present the work and results in conferences and seminars – and only good communication skills will help get good response from listeners. There are many occasions where a researchers gets an opportunity to communicate about his/her work in a few mts, etc. Hence, communication skills are critical for a successful career in research.
Communication skills naturally get evaluated during presentation and interaction, which are always there when a PhD graduate is recruited. While writing skills often get sharpened in the process of writing papers and revising them, particularly if they are being published in respected venues, PhD students should pay more attention to their presentation skills by leveraging (and indeed creating) opportunities to make presentations on their work, or the problem they are working on, or other related matters.
Collaboration skills are important, particularly for industry career. These can be shown by group projects / efforts one has participated in, and general friendliness and ability to listen, etc.
Teaching capability. This capability may be explicitly checked in some academic positions. (In some universities, besides giving a seminar on research, they ask faculty candidates to give a short lecture on some topic, as if you are teaching….). Sometimes, communication skills as shown during the presentation and interactions are used to assess these skills. Having done TA duties during the PhD, and holding tutorials etc for students can help in strengthening this ability and demonstrating capability for it.
These are based on my experience about the research and academic careers, particularly research oriented academic career. However, I believe that for other careers (e.g. NGOs etc, startups, …) also these factors will be important, though the relative weight attached to these may vary, and some other factors may also be given some weight.
Personal Attributes
Finally, let me discuss briefly about the personal/personality attributes which a PhD student needs to strengthen. As the PhD is very different from other degrees, and research is a very different career, the traits that are needed are somewhat different than what typical graduates may need to have in their career. There are many blogs, articles in the popular press and other forums which discuss what are the desired attributes of a PhD student and / or a researcher. Here are some which I feel are most relevant personal attributes:
Motivation and interest. I guess everyone hopes to pursue a degree and a career in which one is interested and is motivated to learn and grow. This is especially true of PhD degree and research career. As there are few “promotion” incentives (due to flat hierarchy), and there are often minimal financial incentives, one must be internally motivated to do research in order to do well in this career. Even if someone has joined the PhD program for some other motives (e.g. I want to become a faculty member), one must develop strong interest in the field and pursuing research, so one is motivated to work hard and try new things. (If one finds at some point in their career that doing research is not of interest anymore, that may be the time to shift to administration or some other career).
Independence and initiative. Due to the nature of the research career, research work is not “assigned” by some manager – typically a researcher finds his/her own work, the research problems to work on. Even in PhD, the supervisors often expect that, after some training, the PhD scholar can come up with his/her own ideas, problems, approaches. This autonomy of work is one of the main attractions of a research career. However, it implies that one must be independent in working and must take initiatives – to find problems, to experiment, to connect with collaborators, to approach other experts for inputs when needed, etc.
Creativity. Creativity and imagination help in any creative/innovative work. Research, by definition, is finding knowledge that does not exist. A person who is creative and has ideas can therefore do well at research.
Ability to work hard and under uncertainty and failures. Research, by definition, is a risky endeavour – the outcomes of research are are inherently uncertain. So, one may approach a line of research and after spending a good amount of time, may determine that the line of inquiry is not worth pursuing, or that the problem has been addressed meanwhile by some other scientists, or that the problem definition is flawed, etc. Even without these uncertainties and false starts, there is no guarantee that a submitted paper, the outcome of research done over many months, will be accepted – many good journals will accept 10% or fewer of the papers submitted. Hence, a researcher must be ready to accept “failure” in that the work done may not be accepted for publication in decent venues. In other words, uncertainty and some failures are inherent in pursuit of research – even the most successful researchers have to face these. But to succeed, one must keep working hard and pursuing new projects and problems. Hence, this ability is critical to success in a research career.
Keeping track of major developments in related fields. Research requires one to keep learning about new developments in your own field. However, as mentioned above, one may have to move to new areas of research every now and then, and so one should try to keep track of developments in related areas. Keeping track of developments in emerging / related fields can be viewed as a personal trait – you not just learn about what is currently needed for your work, but also explore and find out about developments which are not of immediate relevance and which may or may not even get used later.
Integrity. While integrity is desired in all careers, it is fundamental to research. For example, for pursuing a business career a key goal is to enhance revenue and profit – integrity is a desired characteristic but not fundamental to the business goal of revenue and profit. However, research is fundamentally about the pursuit of truth – hence integrity and ethics are far more fundamental than in other careers. To be true to the profession of research requires ethical behaviour which displays integrity. Taking short cuts, not revealing deficiencies in the work, not doing the experiment/analysis/… rigorously, are all undesired behaviour in research. A researcher should develop a strong character to shun these temptations and behave in accordance to the standards set by researchers over the centuries.
These personal attributes are inherently valuable assets of a person – it can be clearly seen that these traits not only define a strong character, they will also help lead a good life. Hence, if a PhD scholar laters pursues a different career – they will serve him/her well.
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Higher Education in India 