CHENNAI: IIT-Madras on Friday signed a memorandum of understanding with Purdue University in the US to enable joint supervision of doctoral candidates between the two institutions. Representatives of the two institutions hoped the partnership will lead to a joint PhD programme later.
The agreement allows Purdue faculty to co-advise doctoral students at IIT-Madras and vice versa. "This will help foster international experience for students at the two universities, with student visits to the other university. There will be a co-adviser from another country," Purdue University president Mitch Daniels said. Purdue University is the third most prominent STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) university in the US, and is ranked highly among world universities in The Times Higher Education World University rankings and the US News and World Report rankings of undergraduate programmes.
More than a dozen faculty members from seven departments at IIT-M are involved in collaborative research with their counterparts at Purdue, which has 1,500 students from India.
The heads of the two institutions spoke about reforms brought in to keep pace with the way students learn and the requirements of the job market. Daniels said they were looking to transform at least one of the university's colleges to a project-based mode to allow students to move through the course according to their potential. Competency-based degrees will be awarded to students based on demonstrated mastery of concepts and skills rather than performance measured only at fixed calendar intervals of classroom time.
The institutions have also been dabbling in hybrid modes of teaching, like flip classrooms and embedded learning that do not insist on "seat time", or how much time a student spend in class or taking notes, but in project-based learning and interactive exchanges and to find out which student is struggling with which concepts.
IIT-M director Bhaskar Ramamurthi said the institute gives students flexibility to learn on their own and go to faculty on a needs only basis. We are forming clubs that are challenge-based, like on water, education, transportation or healthcare, because disruptive solutions are multi-disciplinary, he said. "We realise that business as usual is going to leave us out of business," he said.
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