Institutes across the world are coming up with new ways of imparting education. How are you bringing innovation in pedagogy at your institute?
Our institution has strong pedagogical philosophy to mark and solve the problems. We use many innovative practices  and effective methods of teaching and learning through technology. Process various audio visual aids, gathering enormous technical information online and study material help the students become better engineers.

How important is a strong academia-industry linkage for an engineering institute and how it is beneficial to the students?
As we have our own industrial house and have many educational institutions, we are well aware of relationship between an educational institute and an industry. Only a good linkage between industry and academic organisations can make better technical graduates. It will give us better knowledge about the current requirement of the market, what problems they are facing, what are weak sectors and what are the areas of improvement. This will not only provide the students, a graduation degree, but will also help them in developing social skills, communication skills and most importantly innovation skills so that both the industry and academia are mutually benefited.

Please share some of the unique initiatives taken up by your institute? How can the gap between industry and academia be bridged?
We have introduced ICT-enabled innovative ways to give directions to students. We have tie-up with IIT Bombay and are acting as a resource centre for other institutes and schools by providing certified courses, which make teaching and learning effective through technology. Seminars and conferences are conducted on topics related to industry. We have introduced video conferencing and audio visual aids and are providing notes online to students. Academia’s support can benefit industry by solving its problems. For this, industry should start projects in collaboration with academia. Institutes should also encourage students and faculty to work on these projects and give feedback to industry.

Students complain that most engineering institutes pay more attention towards imparting theoretical knowledge rather than giving practical assignments. Has this trend changed in last few years?
No, this is not true as our institution always lays emphasis on giving projects and assignments related to industry so that students can become skilled professionals. We are organising industrial visits for students so that they can get the idea of work environment of industry. Industrial training of six weeks and six months is already in curriculum. We have started teaching through visual labs to benefit students.

How has been your college’s placement in recent years? Do you think there is sufficient demand in industry for
engineering graduates?
Our college has achieved fifth rank in placement in all the Punjab Technical University affiliated colleges. Every year, we have 80 to 90 percent placement. Our students get placed in top companies with good packages. With the changing job market, there is still demand of skilled workforce having good professional communication and technical skills. Apart from demand of engineers in public and private sector, there is vast requirement of engineers across the globe.

Prof Nupur Prakash, Vice Chancellor, Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University for Women
(IGDTUW), talks about the initiatives undertaken by the university for the betterment of the students

How important is to have a strong academia-industry linkage for an engineering institute and how it is beneficial to the students?Institutes across the world are coming up with new ways of imparting education. How are you bringing innovation in pedagogy at your institute?
We are offering electives through NPTEL digital Lecture series and e-learning modules on COURSERA and EDEX platform.

In order to prepare industry-ready engineers, a strong academia-industry linkage is necessary for a technical university. We have revised our course curriculum by involving experts from industry and have set up labs after collaborating with the industry.

Please share some of the unique initiatives taken by your institute. How can the gap between industry and academia be bridged?
We have forged academia alliances with industries like ARM, Texas Instruments, Atmel, Nokia, Intel, Mahindra & Mahindra and Fluer Daniel for establishing labs on mobile programming, embedded systems and automobile design.

Students complain that most engineering institutes pay more attention towards imparting theoretical knowledge rather than giving practical assignments. Has this trend changed in the last few years?
Our course curriculum has strong practical and lab component. A project designbased approach is followed in all engineering programmes of our university.

India may get the full-fledged membership status of the Washington Accord by June, enabling global recognition of Indian degrees and improving mobility of students and engineers. In your opinion, how it is going to help Indian students and engineering education system?
Only reputed colleges will benefit from the Washington Accord status because a very stringent criterion is followed for accreditation under Washington Accord. Very few colleges and IITs will qualify for Washington Accord status.

What is the importance of an incubation centre and tell us about your plans to install one?
We plan to start a Knowledge Park in our University in 2015, which will have an Entrepreneurship Development Cell, Incubation Centre and Continuing Education Cell. The idea is to incubate new concepts, business plans and innovative ideas initiated by students and faculty.

How has been your college’s placement in recent years? Do you think there is sufficient demand in the industry for the engineering graduates?We achieve 100 percent placement every year with our students getting multiple job offers. Competent industry-ready engineering graduates will always be in demand.

What are the new engineering courses, which are becoming popular?
Courses on green technology, energy studies and nanotechnology have become very popular. We plan to offer specialised course in automobile engineering and mechatronics in future. We are also offering M Tech programmes in mobile computing, information security and robotics.

In India, there are multiple agencies which look into the accreditation, but majority of them have failed to bring quality. In your opinion, does accreditation per-se helps in enhancing the quality of education?
Yes, it does. National Board of Accreditation and National Assessment and Accreditation Council are very effective accreditation bodies, which ensure that good quality in technical education is maintained in accredited institutes.

Er Rajendra Shah, Chairman, SAL Technical Campus, shares his views about the issue of unemployability of fresh technical graduates

Today, employability is a far bigger challenge than unemployment. The term employability refers to the skills required to acquire and retain a job. Employability skills include not only foundational academic skills, but also a variety of attitudes and habits. A disparity exists in the types of skills taught at colleges and those that are demanded in industry. Plagued with problems like curriculum, lack of qualified faculty, poor quality of content, and notso effective examination system. Technical institutions are not able to add value to the job market. After graduation, many students fail to find employment jobs not commensurate with their qualifications. Institutions of management education in particular are deeply concerned to such an extent that their educational perspectives get distorted. High incidence of unemployment, underemployment becomes a matter of serious concern to central and state government.
As per NASSCOM Press Information note, there are already growing concerns about parts of the existing available talent pool being unsuitable for employment due to a skill gap. ‘Employability Skill Index’ was done by Purple Leap, a talent management institute. It covered 600 students from 15 engineering colleges in India. It tested three key employability skills – communication, problem solving and technical skills. When it came to communication skills of engineering students, 80 percent of them did not meet the qualifying criteria. It is understood that communication skills are a problem area especially when it comes to students in tier-II cities. However, it is quite ironical that most of the students in the 20 percent lot, who are fine as far as communication skills are concerned, do not actually end up getting hired, because of either lack of problem solving skills or technical skills. Lack of adequate problem solving skills is one of the biggest gap leading to students not getting enough technical jobs in the industry and in many case, having to settle for ‘non-technical’ role, after an engineering education in tier-II cities.
Last year, in a column of The New York Times, a senior partner at a wellknown consulting firm brought to the mainstream what people within India Inc. always knew – a major chunk of the nation’s graduates and post graduates were unemployable. The skills and the aptitude required by the industry were found wanting though grades and marksheets were aplenty. Some of the basic requirements like a fair knowledge of English and technical know-how were not being met by India’s secondary and higher education system especially in tier II & III cities. In 2012, 40 percent of fresh university graduates joining the India-based IT service companies were women – up from 28 percent only three years ago. A significant percentage of these women were from tier II and smaller cities. The culture in these smaller cities and towns often restricts a number of students, particularly girls from moving to bigger cities to pursue their education. Accordingly, many deserving talented employable candidates miss out on the opportunities found in tier I cities.
Recently, the Indian government announced the goals of employing 500 million youth by 2020 and the National Skill Development Corporation was set up for this aim. But experts know that the government can’t pull this off alone. The private sector would have to pitch in to solve its own headache. If the initiative is taken from all the stakeholders, the youth from tier II cities will become more employable as compared to their counterparts in metro cities.

Vidhatanand, Co-Founder & CEO, Vocabmonk, talks about the role of the company in fostering skill development

How did you get the idea of coming up with Vocabmonk?
The idea of Vocabmonk originated out of my own experience in college. Like most of the students in this high-tech world, I could not develop an aptitude for reading or writing until my high school days. And even then, I was not such an avid reader. Hence, it became an uphill task to build a sufficient vocabulary. My friends and acquaintances faced a similar problem.
I realised this was a real world problem and started digging further in linguistic science. I ended up spending a lot of time researching over lexical learning and vocabulary acquisition. I figured out ‘vocabulary is an abstract skill’ and every student has a different lexical size depending on various factors like reading habits, education over the years, etc and reached to the conclusion that vocabulary building should be personalised.
There are active and passive ways of learning new words; passive learning like subconscious acquisition of new words, which is very slow and hence, people resort to active methods like using flash cards and word-lists, but again active methods are very boring and mundane, eventually becoming highly demoralising for students. Also, most students give up on this midway. Hence, the drive to make learning fun and engaging, struck me.
In my research process, I started interacting with a lot of teachers on what was their take on vocabulary building. They all agreed on the need of personalised vocabulary building. Vocabulary building is not the prime focus of teaching in the class along with which there also lies an assumption that students may be working on it after classes. However, in such a state of affairs, there is no mechanism, which cross checks or confirms that vocabulary building is taken care of. Hence, there exists a need to develop an easier yet effective mechanism that not only caters to students, but also teachers by making it easily accessible.
Premising on the research, I decided to build first-of-its-kind vocabulary building tool, Vocabmonk.

How do you assist students, teachers and parents through the platform?
Vocabmonk is a cloud-based vocabulary building platform. Students can access it from mobile and desktop as well. It allows the students to take ownership of learning without any hesitation of getting observed. High level of game mechanics is a major magnet, which has boosted participation and engagement levels of students, for instance, one of the most popular features is taking vocab-challenges against friends and classmates on Vocabmonk, which has been a hit.
In addition to it, this platform also assists the teachers to monitor the progress of the students and give valuable data as reports, which will let them give effective individual attention. We have made sure the teachers, who are not so tech savvy also, get access to useful reports via our offline reporting process.
Apart from that, the engagement of parents towards their children’s progresscan also be observed regularly with ease. The automatic updates about their children’s plan, work and progress can be scrutinised in a fruitful manner using SMS and email.
The gamification and reward systems have shown a dramatic inclination in terms of participation, by ensuring not only implementation, but also effective usage.

Please share your views on skill education in India?
Skill development is hardly focussed in our country. Education or rather literacy is still, at least procedurally, focussed at. Therefore, we find that even at an intra-institutional level, skills do not come to all uniformly. The belief in merit is taken at face value, implying that each student has a personal and ‘natural’ aptitude for skill development. But in my view, it depends on what in sociology is called ‘life-chances’. So skills do not come naturally, but can be developed. And Vocabmonk is one of the platforms that can help foster skill development.

Amitabh Vira, CEO, Dragonfly Education, talks about the initiatives they have undertaken to bring excellence in engineering education

Tell us something about Dragonfly Education.
The idea of establishing Dragonfly Education is to set up a centre of excellence among engineering institutions. Our mission is to make every moment for students on campus, a moment of learning where courseware combines with assessment and students have the potential to achieve higher marks as a result of the total use of our combined solution, by both faculty and students.
‘Dragonfly Masterclass’ is a 360 degrees solution. In classroom, we offer a blended teaching programme that integrates into a conventional classroom through our multimedia enhanced courseware. Outside the classroom, students can log on to our self-learning portal and learn at their own pace and time. And finally, we assess their performance through our assessment platform. Digital learning adds value to the curriculum and offers faculty a chance to break out of the traditional mould of chalk and talk. Our USP is the 360 degrees learning platform for students, which is done through both innovative use of technology and a unique courseware.

What is Dragonfly Education’s contribution in bringing excellence in engineering education?
Our aim is to change students’ mindset about learning. We want to demystify engineering education, make it visual and real for them and create a process around understanding and learning. We believe that our institution is in the business of effective education. To deliver effective learning, Dragonfly is creating a centre of excellence in campus, which will impact teachers, students and institution as a whole. Ours is a 360 degrees programme, where each component complements the other.

How flexible are engineering institutions in the country in adopting these types of learning solutions?
Theoretical learning sets the foundation of core subjects. We can’t do away with them and mostly, these fundamentals don’t change. They only get more exciting with examples of how theoretical concepts have been applied by practitioners across the world, be it Burj in Dubai or windmill system in Amsterdam or the Metro in Delhi.
We need to link theory with practical assignments in partnership with industry. India lags behind as we don’t invite industry enough. Institutions in India need to see themselves as being in the business of effective education and not in the business of providing and charging for infrastructure. Change needs to come through awareness and policies.

What are the programmes offered by Dragonfly Education and how it is structured?
Dragonfly Education follows the international methodology and best practice of Teaching-Learning-Assessment. Hence we have three specific programmes for both colleges and students around the TLA model. They are
• The Masterclass courseware
• Student Learning Programme
• Student Assessment Platform

The Teaching programme comprises of digital courseware blended with classroom along with faculty teaching in colleges.

The Learning programme is an online learning system called ‘magicmarks’, which offer students the option to go online and learn at their own pace and time.

The Assessment programme starts in each classroom, where we have created a few assessment questions for each lecture. Students can assess themselves online. And finally, there is a question paper platform that allows faculty to conduct unit wise tests and mock papers using our technology, All three programmes courseware, student assessment and the online learning system deliver an integrated solution to institutions and their students.

Tell us about your institutional learning solution ‘Dragonfly Masterclass’. How does it function and what is the output of this learning solution?
The stakeholders of Dragonfly Masterclass are faculty, students and college administrators. Faculty delivers the Masterclass courseware over the faculty management system. Since it is hosted on the college local area network, faculty gets direct and real time access of the courseware in the classrooms. Faculty is also given an internet-based platform to access outside the campus. They can use the platform for classroom preparation. In addition to the courseware, faculty can access the student’s assessment platform, hosted on the Masterclass server (on cloud). On the other hand, students are also given access to the server to view courseware content with innovation learning features. The aim of this learning process is to bring higher learning quotient of a college. which is measured by improved attendance, increased number of questions asked in class and better examination results