While major aspects of day-to-day life have been disrupted due to this COVID-19, pioneering educational institutions like KPR Institute of Engineering and Technology (KPRIET) have understood that time is precious in collegiate education, and students should be shown ways to utilize this period in a productive manner.
KPRIET has found ways to unlock the knowledge potential of students, faculty and even the non-teaching staff of the college during this lockdown period by making use of the digital platforms and domain. While we have heard of teaching, internal exams and assessment going online during this lockdown, this college has taken up conducting even Placement Training classes to through the digital medium in an effecient way.
To know more about these, we approached Dr.Akila, Principal, KPRIET. She said “Under the guidance of our Chairman Dr.K.P.Ramaswamy, we found that international universities like MIT are offering free online certification courses. We came across many open-source mobile applications Google Classroom , Zoom etc that could be used in teaching/learning process.Lectures and video explanation are sent to students’ mobile through Google Classroom.
The college also makes use of TCS Ltd’s TCSION Digital Classroom (as it has a TCS Examination Center) to upload lectures and notes. As the students in one classroom are divided into smaller groups and sorted under a mentor, that professor get in touch with student and notes the participation of the student in these online classes.”
Internal Exams are held online. Each question paper is different (i,e) by making use of the question bank, the paper is made unique for all. Students will have to manually calculate the solutions for questions and thus the question paper is made fool-proof.
AICTE has announced that there are 9 domains through which revolutionary technologies are emerging. To learn them, Digital platforms like Coursera, EDEX and Swayam which acts portals to learn online certification courses offered by various reputed global universities is introduced to staff and students. This is to increase their knowledge and aptitude in engineering.
(As KPRIENT is an autonomous institution, if the students earn 3-Credit points in these online certification courses, they can drop a professional-elective paper. This provision is possible in autonomous institutions)
1819 students in the college are undertaking these online courses out of the 2936 total strength. Apart from students, faculties too have undertaken these courses. The 3rd years students are given placement training through Webinars. 100% student participation has been achieved for this placement training classes, conveyed Dr.Akila. Research-focused faculty are also making efficient use of this period by writing research-articles. 15 faculty have published their articles in reputed journals. 4-5 faculty are in the final leg of book-publishing.
Going beyond this, she added that the student-counsellors of the college who are qualified in psychology guide the students with positive thoughts. Yoga teacher in the campus sends simple asanas to students. Even the non-teaching staff are guided to learn simple computer applications like MS Word for their benefit.