IIT Kharagpur, Roorkee join Bombay in global ranking

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October 9, 2012

Three IITs, as compared only one last year, have found a place in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2012-13, the latest list consists of the world’s top 400 universities. However, no Indian institute has been able to figure in the top 200. While only one institute IIT Bombay had figured in the last year’s ranking, this year IIT Kharagpur, IIT Bombay and IIT Roorkee have made a place for themselves in the list. According to the Times ranking, IIT Kharagpur placed in the 226-250 group of ranking is the best institute in India followed by IIT Bombay and IIT Roorkee.

But despite an emerging trend of Asian universities surging ahead, what is disturbing is that none of the IITs figure in the top 200. Among the Asian countries, Japan has the highest representation of 5 among the top 200. Universities in China, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea have climbed in performance mirroring a power shift from the West to the East. There are 21 Asian universities in the top 200. University of Tokyo and the National University of Singapore are the top two Asian universities.

Phil Baty, editor Times Higher Education Rankings said, Indian universities were bubbling under the surface inching close to top 200. “We are seeing some real changes.” “I am happy that three IITs have figured in the list. But our objective should be to place atleast 4-5 IITs in the top 250,” IIT Roorkee director Prof P Banerji said. Times Higher Education World University Rankings judges universities on parameters such as teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook based on 13 performance indicators. While in teaching IIT Bombay scores highest amongst the three institutes, IIT Kharagpur has performed best in industry outcome.

More Indians choose non-US places to study management

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October 9, 2012

Business schools in India, Singapore, UK and France have become new destinations for Indians for management education. In the year testing 2012, 18% of the 1.33 lakh Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) scores that Indians sent to business schools were to those in India, up from 13.5% in testing year 2008.

A testing year runs from July 1 to June 30. Schools in the UK (7% to 8%), Singapore (4.5% to 7.5%) and France (3.5% to 5%) also experienced a growth in their popularity in the same period. Comparatively, the proportion of scores that Indians sent to US schools fell from 64% to 51%.

“People’s choices are becoming more sophisticated now as they are looking for choices at all continents,” said Ashish Bhardwaj, regional director, South Asia, of the Graduate Management Admission Council, while visiting the city on Sunday. GMAT is the admission criterion for more than 1,500 B-schools worldwide.

“The US is among the costliest, so it is a question of return on investment,” said Abbasali Gabula, deputy director, external relations and administration at SP Jain Institute of Management and Research in Andheri. “With the current jobs scene it doesn’t make sense to go to countries where the post-MBA situation isn’t good.”

Popular schools outside the US include the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, INSEAD in France and Singapore Management University in Singapore. The growing popularity of Indian programmes is also evident through the fact that students sent GMAT scores to 128 programmes in testing year 2012, compared to just 24 in testing year 2007.

In testing year 2012, Indian test takers jumped from 25,394 to 30,213, a 19% growth. India is third when it comes to GMAT test takers across the world, following the US and China.

IIM-C to offer Global MBA soon

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October 9, 2012

The Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, has entered into a global partnership with Cems, an elite club of 28 business schools of the world, that will enable it to offer a double master’s degree to select students at the time of passing out. The IIM-C administration calls this the first step towards “globalisation”.

Cems was earlier known as the Confederation of European Management Schools, but the nomenclature changed recently when it decided to open its doors to elite B-schools beyond Europe. The London School of Economics, HEC France, Essade Spain, HKUST Hong Kong andRichard Ivy from Canada are members of Cems. It still does not accept membership from B-schools in the US.

IIM-C will be the first Indian B-school to be part of Cems when it signs the deal in November. It went through a year-long vetting where IIM-C’s curriculum, teaching and examination techniques, achievements of students and placements were considered. The clinching factor for IIM-C was its focus on quantitative courses – those with a hint on operations management and finance, heavily depending on maths and statistics. That apart, IIM-C is the only one in the IIM chain to have a management centre for human values, which won it brownie points.

Being a Cems member would mean that select IIM-C students will now get the coveted Masters in Management Programme degree, better known worldwide as the MIM degree which has been consistently rated as one of the five best global management degrees. The institute is modifying its two-year flagship programmes so that the top 27 students can also get the MIM degree at the time of graduating from IIM-C. Students who enter from the 2013 academic year will be eligible for the new course.

“We limit the opportunity to 27 students because each student would be attending course modules framed by the 27 other member B-schools of Cems on their respective campuses. To attain this double degree a student will have to put in at least 75 hours of extra classroom contact apart from international projects that he/she will have to do. This is over and above attending the IIM-C curriculum and exams,” explained Ashoke Banerjee, IIM-C dean.

Students would be selected for the programme only after their first-year results have been declared. After completing the first term of the second year, selected students will have to attend classes for three months at a Cems member school abroad, and return to IIM-C for the final term. “The curriculum of such students in the second year here will also include extra modules designed keeping the MIM degree in mind,” explained Banerjee.

The institute will tie up with several foreign companies so that those selected for the Cems course will complete their summer internship with them and submit the mandatory international project.

Only 1 Indian B-school in the Economist’s top 200 Global MBA

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October 9, 2012

Only one Indian business school has been able able to make it to The Economist magazine’s full time MBA ranking. Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad stood at the 56th position among the top 100 business schools in the world. Booth School of Business, US has topped the ranking.

US has 45 plus B-Schools in the list including institutes like Harvard Business School, Tick School of Business, Kenan Flagler Business School, Wharton School and Carlson School of Management. UK came in next with 10 plus institutes like Cass Business School, Henley Business School, Warwick Business School among others. IIM-A is the only Indian business institute to be ranked for the past three years.

“The continued dismal performance of Indian educational institutes on global rankings points to the lack of global mindset and dearth of research activity in the Indian education scenario. To be able to get into these prestigious rankings, institutes here need to concentrate on improving their research output and global content,” said the India education practice head of a global consultancy firm.

India has been performing poorly in almost all the world rankings brought out by internationally reputed organisations in the past few weeks. None of the institutes in India made it even to the Top 200 universities across the globe in the QS World University Rankings. India was perhaps the only BRICS nation to not feature among the world’s top 200 educational institutions. Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi featured on the list at 212th position, followed by IIT Bombay at 227th position and IIT Kanpur at 278th position.

B-Schools Need to Take Holistic Approach to Mentoring

Interviews

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October 9, 2012

“Leadership are in need to innovate in the way they approach and deliver business, it is no longer ‘business as usual’,” says Ms. Stephanie T Struges, Senior Lecturer, Coaching & Mentoring Research Unit (CMRU), Sheffield Business School (SBS). SBS is a part of the Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom. SBS offers ‘Sheffield City Region Leadership’ program that focuses on creating innovative regional leadership.

What is the Sheffield City Region Leadership program?

The Sheffield City Region Leadership programme is an innovative leadership development programme that brings together aspiring leadership from various sectors across a geographic region. They are required to deal with the regional challenge from a cross sector perspective as well as organisational and individual challenges. This moves away from the more traditional approach of leadership development within a singular context or ‘silo’ approach. The programme also places a focus on combining academic theory with practice by dealing with real time challenges.

How the course is different from other business management programs?

A traditional approach to business management programmes tends to separate theory from practice. Whereas a core feature of the programme is that it combines the application of theory to ‘real time’ issues. This feature is reinforced through the academic assessment where participants deal with workplace challenges as academic assignments to deepen the integration of learning and practice.

Leadership development is often viewed as one’s own leadership approach and capabilities within a context of the individual, the team, department or the organization. This programme focuses beyond these boundaries to introduce a cross sector context to leader and leadership development. The programme requires an innovative approach to be taken to the leadership ‘across a city region’ and requires innovation in the provision of service delivery within an organisational context and a cross sector regional context.

The global financial crisis has placed a demand upon organisations to deliver more with less. Whilst traditional programmes may be subject to superficial evaluation this would not be sufficient within this new and challenging leadership context. As a result the programme required an approach that engaged in substantial evaluation of competency enhancement and impact analysis at many levels. By doing this we could start to demonstrate the development and transfer of learning to deal with the real time challenges of service delivery within a financially constrained agenda of change. This approach addresses the solution for organisations to work together to solve the big problems facing communities, rather than to compete for funds. As a result this programme requires and provides collaborative leadership development for innovative solutions to cross agency problems.

Why do we need coaching and mentoring programs?

Learning occurs in many ways and coaching and mentoring are a part of multi-learning approach to individual development. These approaches focus on enhancing individual performance within an organisational context. This programme requires a cross sector capability from each individual in their leadership approach. This requires both challenge and support. Coaching and mentoring can provide this in one to one relationships within a programme of development thereby offering a holistic approach. Coaching and mentoring are often used without discernment or differentiation. They can also be provided by those who have had little or no training. The coaching on this programme is provided by qualified coaches from the CMRU of SBS thereby providing a level of quality assurance. SBS provides an Internationally recognised MSc in Coaching and Mentoring. Mentoring is provided by senior executives from the city region thus enabling a cross sector strategic perspective.

How do you see business schools in India as compared to those in EU and USA in terms of providing mentoring to its students?

Mentoring is a frequent approach to supporting individual used in business schools however the quality and approach to this mentoring is perhaps the real question here. Whilst mentoring is provided it is often provided on a voluntary basis without training. This can reduce the effectiveness of the mentoring relationship for both the student and the mentor in addition to leaving the mentor in a position of being unsupported.

Business schools are required to take a more cohesive and holistic approach to mentoring within business as a part of their strategy for individual’s development. There is much expertise available in the design of mentoring schemes which incorporate training and support mechanism and can replace the more frequent approach of random selection.

Do you think leadership and innovation is interconnected? If yes, how?

In a context of global crisis and ever changing environments I think the two are interconnected. Leadership are in need to innovate in the way they approach and deliver business, it is no longer ‘business as usual’. Technological changes happen faster and leaders of and within organisations need to work proactively to find new way of doing things and develop their individual capability to deal with this complexity and ambiguity. Changing business model and working practices both require innovation.

In conversation with Nikita Apraj

UGC to grant innovation university tag to worthy institutes

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October 8, 2012

After making way for foreign institutes to collaborate with Indian ones, the University Grants Commission (UGC) is all set to help chart an alternative route to set up ‘world class’ innovation universities in the country. At a recent meeting, the UGC decided to launch a scheme for conferring the tag of “innovation universities” and “innovation centres” to worthy institutes. To be implemented in the 12th plan period, the scheme will fund existing Central and state universities as well as the best of deemed to be universities to upgrade to an innovation university/ centre status, provided they meet certain parameters related to innovative research.

The minutes of the meeting say that government varsities apart, those deemed varsities that were classified as category ‘A’ by the Tandon committee — indicating that they meet all specified criteria — will also be eligible for an innovative university tag. However, no grants or funding will be released to self-financing deemed to be universities. The UGC intends to extend the scheme to colleges. The Universities of Innovation Bill — in the works since 2009 and introduced in the Lok Sabha in May 2012 — aims at establishing varsities that will encourage superlative academic quality and research output. These were to be set up either by the government, private entities or through public private partnerships and offer unmatched academic freedom.

The Bill provides for upgradation of universities/ institutes to the status of innovation universities, provided they meet certain criteria — a suggestion made by the Planning Commission. It promises a flexible framework allowing freedom to appoint a foreign academician as a vice-chancellor, invite a promising student to join as faculty, allow varsities to device their own merit-based admission process, individual quality standards free from UGC, and to keep the varsity out of CAG’s ambit.

MIT professors wait to teach students, for free

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October 8, 2012

An interactive web-based learning portal, EdX, has been launched by the two elite universities MIT and Harvard, with the aim of making high quality education available to anyone in the world with internet access. The courses are conducted by MIT or Harvard professors. Lab experiments are followed by discussions in which students participate. Students are also given assignments, and once a course begins, it is accessible 24 hours a day.

In a telephonic conversation from Boston, Anant Agarwal, president of EdX and a professor of electronics at MIT, says, “Over 20,000 Indian students registered with the portal for the 6.002x course, which is the second-highest number after the US itself. The enrollment for this season is still on.” The 6.002x was the first course to be launched, in September, and is taught by professor Agarwal himself.Agarwal hails from Mangalore and graduated from IIT-Madras. He has been living in the US for the past 30 years.

Following the course’s huge success, seven more courses were introduced. The University of California, Berkeley has also joined the collaboration. “Our goal is to continue to expand EdX’s course offerings and key university partners, while maintaining high quality standards,” says Agarwal, adding that they plan on joining hands with IITs in the near future.

BHU goes hi-tech to provide better internet facilities

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October 8, 2012

The internet services for students and staff members of Banaras Hindu University (BHU) will soon be hassle free, fast and resistance free. Richa Srivastava, a research scholar, said that there are many lecture session by eminent professors and scientists uploaded in the form of videos on various informative websites. If the speed of the internet becomes better, we can access them fast.

According to Prof Satyabrata Jit, department of Electronics Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT, BHU), the band width of the internet connection is being increased to 825 mbps promising to withstand internet traffic and provide good speed to students. Notably, so far the internet band width in BHU was only 120 mbps for national knowledge network and 60 mbps for local area network (LAN). Around Rs 80 lakhs has been spent in increasing the band width of the internet.

“The new band width has been provided and we are observing the maximum usage by users so that its performance is being monitored”, added Jit. Apart from that to avoid frequent technical snags in internet cables, mainly caused due to digging and other construction works on varsity campus, computer centre has purchased a link aggregator for Rs 87 lakhs. This problem was faced recently at some hostels when the inmates had also staged demonstration demanding better network facilities. “The link aggregator will connect the multiple network connections in parallel to increase output beyond what a single connection could sustain, and will provide redundancy in case one of the links fails. It is being installed at present and this process will take around 20 to 25 days to complete”, informed Jit.

Meanwhile, computer centre has recently installed a new firewall of 10 Gbps worth Rs 3.04 crores. Moreover, computer centre has also received a fund of Rs 30 lakhs to meet the expenses in several repairing replacement work related to internet facility.

Goa women top higher education enrolment

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October 8, 2012

Goa’s higher education institutes have a female enrollment of 61.2%, making it the highest women enrollment for higher studies in any state in India. The findings, published in the latest annual report of the University Grants Commission (UGC) for 2010-11, show that Goa has not just retained the top spot since 2006-07 but has bettered its past record.

Kerala, which found itself in the second spot in women enrollment at 56.8%, was ousted by Goa from the top spot in 2006-07, when the state recorded female enrolment of 59%. Though Goa remained at the top for the following years, the figure remained static until 2010-11. The UGC report notes that across the country the percentage increase in women enrolment has been almost minimal as compared to the total enrolment in all states, during 2010-2011 over the receding year.

“Even at the degree level, the enrolment of girls is higher and the same trend is reflected at the university level. Drop out is more among boys at the school level in Goa as lot of gainful employment opportunities are available to them. We have also noticed that girls take home most scholarships and merit awards in the state. We are also happy that more girls are choosing careers in research over the last five years,” Goa University registrar Vijayendra Kamat said.

Other than Goa, Kerala and a few north eastern states, enrolment of women in higher education is below 50% in other states. Goa was not among states that established several women’s colleges during the academic year 2010-11, yet the state improved its numbers. The report shows that the number of colleges in Goa has gone up from 46 in 2006-07 to 54 in 2010-11. Goa University received total grants of Rs 1.74 crore from the UGC during the year as against Rs 24 lakh in 2005-06. Goa was among states that were granted accreditation by UGC to conduct state eligibility tests (SET) for lecturer-ship in 2005-06 and it has continued to hold the test regularly since then.

Assam to get its first IIIT in 2014

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October 8, 2012

An Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) that is coming up Guwahati is likely to become operational by 2014, education and health minister Himanta Biswa Sarma.

Sarma said on Thursday that the government was working towards a 2013 deadline for making the IIIT operational but in the event it failed, then it would become operational by 2014.

“Students who have passed Plus II examination will be eligible for admission to the IIIT,” said Sarma.

“While 50 per cent seats will be reserved for students from the state, the remaining seats will be filled by students from outside the state and also from some South East Asian countries,” he said, while adding that the IIIT would be a centre of excellence not only in the country but also in the South East Asia.

The minister also said that the government will introduce tele-radiology in all the 27 districts of Assam by 2013.

He pointed out that Assam is the only state in the country selected for the implementation of the tele-radiology scheme, which has already been launched in Haflong – headquarters of Dima Hasao district.

“The images of patients who undergo CT scan or MRI were being sent to MMC Hospital in Guwahati through IT. The report is then ready and sent within hours. The twin advantage of the scheme is that it takes care of the shortage of radiologists while also saving time and money of patients,” he said.

The government will be spending around Rs.55 crore under the National Rural Health Mission to cover all the district headquarters under the programme by 2013, he said.

Source: IANS

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