Teaching And Learning in Engineering (TALE)

ABOUT THE COURSE : The quality of Teaching And Learning in Engineering (TALE) has come to be an important issue in India to all stakeholders including teachers, students, parents, Managements, University, AICTE, NBA and Industry. The quality of learning of the graduating engineers determines the quality of their placements. While there has been significant increase in the last few decades in our understanding of how people learn, there has not been much intersection of this knowledge with the instructional practices at institutions of higher learning. The dominant instructional method still remains lecturing. Industry, Regulatory Bodies and Accreditation Agencies in India want the engineering graduates attain a set of Program Outcomes (knowledge, skills and attitudes) which are discipline agnostic and a set of Program Specific Outcomes identified by the Department offering the program. The curriculum of a program decides the nature of learning experiences including the courses, projects, internships, and co-curricular and extra-curricular activities.The focus on students attaining a certain set of outcomes requires a shift from teacher centric approach to student centric instruction. While good teachers, in any era or in any part of the world, were and are always student centric in their approach the process of designing and conducting a course remained informal in nature. The contexts of instruction including quality and background of students, teacher expertise, physical environment and the system in which instruction takes place, available resources, regulatory and accreditation mechanisms, and assessment and evaluation mechanisms are extremely varied. There is no unique method that leads to good learning in all contexts. The course TALE addresses many of the common issues of teaching and learning in engineering in the Indian context and tries to provide a complete solution to a teacher to the process of design and conduct of an engineering course leaving all the academic freedom he/she wants to have. While at some places the solutions appear to be specific they can be treated as examples, and alternate solutions can be worked out by the teacher. TALE is presented as a set of four modules with each module having about 20 half-hour units. This course will be useful to all teachers of higher education institutions offering undergraduate programs in engineering.