Technology Map for VIT: A Vision for the future

• Tie-ups with institutions for internships and job placements. Pune has lot of companies who would welcome this move.

• Producing quality software and using tools like rational rose. All BE software projects should pass the quality test. They should have UML diagrams, user manuals…

• Introduce concept of work while u study:

Create a VIT website. Sell education or provide education to as many students as possible who are willing to excel. Paid Webmaster positions. Let students handle the website. Let students create a website for the library and handle the books online.

• Seminars on latest technologies for the students by the students. More stronger role by IEEE. Have students ever submitted articles to IEEE potentials? Are they even aware of it that they can?

• Motivation for professors and students by giving them awards and incentives. Teachers should be encouraged to do meaningful research and publish in their field of expertise. This will help the teachers to stay in touch with the latest technologies and share knowledge with students. A prize for “ Best teacher of the year” should be introduced. Promote new experiments in teaching.

• Integrate departments more closely. Robotics projects should be assigned.

• Provide career counseling to students. Encouraging them to go for higher education. Enhance the role provided by placement department. Provide SOP counseling and GRE training. I can provide resources and charge the students for counseling and channel the money for other prizes.

• Improve the quality of education. Stop dictating notes to students? If the professors feel that their notes are important they can put copies online or in the library for students to copy. This will help students to concentrate in the class. Let students conduct 1 chapter of the book. Sell mini tape recorders for students to record the teachers lecture so that no pencil paper is required in class. Ask students to write software to automate things. As a simple example ask students to write a program to plot the bode plot and finds its 3dB freq giving the poles and zeroes of the filter. Use software like MATLAB for plotting graphs of all the experiments in the lab. Involve software assignments for each course for each branch. The software assignments should be a part of the bigger project at the end of the class. It could also contribute towards oral.

• Weekly quiz as a solution to attendance. Students who miss the quiz and fair poorly can be handled. This will also help in detecting cases of physical attendance but no mental presence. Employ students of senior yr to grade the assignments or let students grade it them selves.

• Newsletter more towards new technology.

• Discussion mailing lists for classes.

• Software from SE itself. If India has to become a software superpower, VIT should also contribute! Encourage students of all branches to do software programming assignments. Conduct classes to teach C++ and charge the students at no profit bases.

• More meaningful BE projects. 95% or maybe more of the BE projects are junk!

• For ELEX students are they ever encouraged to refer to the designs in Electric design magazine? Have they ever submitted anything? Are there Software competitions? Competitions like obfuscated code and quiz using C++ and STL for students?

• More meaning full labs? The whole structure of the labs needs to be changed. Students never enjoy the fun of the experiments because they never develop the experiments instead just asked to follow the mechanical steps.

• Tap resources of alumni students of VIT using the website. Ask them to contribute in any form not just financially. Some alumni would like to contribute in terms of knowledge and like to have partial control over the events which they fund.

• Question of the week? Encourage students to ask questions and post the most challenging question of the work. Give a prize of Rs.100 or let it influence the oral marks. Students will then start creating questions and then the quest of answers will begin.

• Use lease line to create student email accounts. Charge a monthly fee for students to use internet at a cheap price and have increased revenue.

• Use Simulation or simulate experiments using Pspice and Digitial Circuit simulator before going to the lab. This will help the students to prepare for the lab and anticipate what they expected and what they didn’t.

• The structure of the lab reports needs to be changed. Soft copies should be accepted with meaning full insight in the experiments written by the students. There should be a discussion section where the student discusses his thoughts. Let students do more experiments and give a prize for the student who creates a good experiment to prove a point.

- Mukesh Motwani (Sept 30 2003)