siliconindia | |February 20199universities with large funding can bring-in research and infrastructure dollars and attract the best minds (who now go abroad) to work in India. A couple of words about some professors, who impressed me with their teaching styles, Prof. S.K. Roy of IIMB had a technique that I have not seen many teachers use. Maybe it came from experience in doing theatrical plays. While explaining something, he used to stop in the mid-sentence, and wait. After a brief wait, some students would be tempted to complete the sentence. That was a unique way of getting student's atten-tion. Another technique he used was to speak in a low volume, deliberately. Again, students would strain to catch his words, and discipline would not be an issue.Most of us who took his Org. Be-haviour class still remember the way he started teaching the subject. He described a story of two kids born on the same night to mothers on neighbouring beds in an hospital. It was a Diwali night, with crackers going-off all around - according to his story. One kid is very fair, good look-ing, cuddly and so on and the other, dark, ugly, pock-marked. He built-up the story until the kids grew-up, and described the impact of their looks (and other people's reactions to them) had on their personality.Experiential Learning was a course that Prof. Gopal Valecha taught us at IIMB. The first class was unique. There was no talking - it was banned. We had to watch, touch, and experience in silence. We could use mime if we wanted to communicate. The idea was to get in touch with our feelings, which mostly remain hidden or suppressed by excessive emphasis on the spoken word. The only other time I experienced such a long silence again many years later was in a meeting where no one wanted to take on some difficult job that had to be done - hence the silence. Talking is a highly over-rated way to communicate, I am convinced, after that course.Another course that was great in its conception was Effective Com-munication by Prof. Jagadish. Here, it was the things we did that made it unique. We had a 20 minute presenta-tion to make on a topic of our choice. I did one on the Romantic Poets - full of nice quotes from Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Byron. That was one of my most memorable presenta-tions in my student life. Another came in the U.S., when our group watched a James Bond movie and drew a pro-ject management chart for his mission in the movie, and made a presentation of it for a project management course at Clemson.The potential for innovation is tremendous. If only we innovate in teaching methods, students are likely to learn a lot more. My daughter tells me that history is the most interest-ingly taught subject in her junior col-lege. I can still recollect the many bor-ing classes that I had on the subject. So, it is not the subject, but the teacher who counts. Otherwise, the book is as good a source to cram the facts and figures from.My theory is that we do not uti-lize the enthusiasm students have, and their energy for doing creative and original things in India. Projects can be conceived to make students do novel things. I have had students maintain diaries, submit 10-15 down-loaded articles each from the internet, collect new data through leg-work, work on overnight computer assign-ments, make presentations, write new cases, write blogs and play a bidding game. And maybe I still have not tried a lot of things. I also view exams as a great learning experience, in an au-tonomous system. Many of my exams were either open book or objective type, or case-based. The purpose was to make the student think in the exam hall, even if they had not done so ear-lier in the course. Most of the exams we have typically test the student's memory and the teacher's patience, while correcting the papers. With to-day's technology, it should be possi-ble to make most of the testing online, and with immediate feedback. The movie starring Robin Williams, `Dead Poets' Society', makes a great case for innovation in teaching. So does `Taare Zamin Par', the movie about a dyslexic learner, who needs to be taught differently. It is not the subject, but the teacher who counts. Otherwise, the book is as good a source to cram the facts and figures fromRajendra Vishwanath Nargundkar
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