Project E-QUAL Newsletter - Volume II, Issue II

E-QUALNEWS A BI-MONTHLY NEWSLETTER OF THE EU-INDIA PROJECT E-QUAL VOLUME 2, ISSUE 2, February-March 2015

NEW DIMENSIONS

Location courtesy: Shiv Nadar University, Delhi

Arkaprabha Chakraborty explains what we talk about when we talk about quizzing! A Report on famine and dearth in Early Modern India and Britain: Connected cultural histories of food security Sumana Banerjee on the role of technology in knowledge sharing: The case of “DECCMA” Angshumitra Ghosh gives an Overview of “TRAILS” Project of School of Education Technology, JU Kush Sengupta on Digital Pedagogy and Archival Research Barnamala Roy on Where did the Teachers Go? “Hole in the Wall” and the Future of Learning A Report on SNU Project E-QUAL Conference “Enabling Pedagogies in Higher Education”

BI-MONTHLY NEWSLETTER OF THE EU-INDIA PROJECT E-QUAL VOLUME 2, ISSUE 2, MARCH 2015

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Contents Editorial Note ................................................................................................................................................ 3 What We Talk about When We Talk about Quizzing (Arkaprabha Chakraborty) ........................................... 5 Famine and Dearth in India and Britain,1550-1800. Connected Cultural Histories of Food Security (Professor Amlan Das Gupta, Dr Ayesha Mukherjee)……………………………………………………………………………………….……10 Role of Technology in Knowledge Sharing: The Case of DECCMA (Sumana Banerjee) .............................. 12 Development of Web based Teaching materials (Engineering) for Undergraduate and Post-Graduate Laboratory at Jadavpur University: An Overview of “TRAILS” Project (Angshumitra Ghosh) .................... 15 Digital Pedagogy: A Step Towards a Smarter Future in Education and Archival Research (Kush Sengupta) . 26 Where did the Teachers Go? “Hole in the Wall” and the Future of Learning (Barnamala Roy)..................... 29 Enabling Pedagogies in Higher Education in India, E-QUAL Project Conference ....................................... 33

Published by the Central Communications Unit, EU-India Project E-QUAL, School of Education Technology, Jadavpur University, Kolkata- 700 032, India. Email: [email protected] Website: www.projectequal.net Editors: Deepnanda Ray, Piyali Chakraborty and Somak Mukherjee


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Editorial Note The months of February and March 2015 proved to be quite hectic for the Central Communication Unit at Jadavpur University. But it was also a period of great productivity. We remained occupied with the administrative tasks as the financial year was drawing to a close. At the same time, content development and courseware production for the modules (both “Evolution of Film Form” and “Digital Cultures”) were in full force. We are pleased to say a considerable part of the content production has already been completed from our institution. But we also had an additional academic task which required a lot of brainstorming. We were extremely pleased to participate in the first academic conference of Project E-QUAL on 26 and 27 March 2015, which took place in Shiv Nadar University, titled “ Enabling Pedagogies in Higher Education in India”. All the project partners, with the sole exception of University of Bologna actively participated in the conference. It was an immensely enriching and rewarding experience as this platform gave the first opportunity to researchers and academics involved with the project to engage with their peers from other partner institutions and freely discuss ideas. The seminar truly became a convergence of diverse thought and critical output provided by researchers who deeply care about their own discipline as well as the common thread of pedagogical modalities present in the learning aspect of each discipline. As the Conference Coordinator and Professor of English at Shiv Nadar University put it with great eloquence in her official vote of thanks, “My hope is that the intensity of the engagement and the richness of the conversation will continue and become friendships -- that enabled space of learning and being that is perhaps the best for conversation and is perhaps the actual ideal model for institutions of higher learning. I, and I know many of you, don't have a background in Education theory, and there is little by way of work on understanding the terrain of higher education (most of the work seems to be focussed on schools), to that extent what we started in the last two days is important and bears following up because as we continue to inhabit universities as places of enchantment we urgently need to have the continuous process of critique in place. While we celebrate the international collaborations that we now have the opportunity for, while we rejoice in the access to technology, the conference showed, me at at least, that this has to be constantly put in context of the realities of the Indian college classroom. If that pushes us to acknowledge that a solution that looked like a solution is only a superficial fix, then we have to have the courage to accept that.” Our paper in the conference was based on the cognitive and cultural challenges involved in the aspect of interactivity in technology enabled learning. We hope to publish our paper in the future issues of E-QUAL News as it involves considerable theoretical and technical discussion. The hospitality we have received during the course of the conference from the faculty members, staff members and administrative/executive section of Shiv Nadar University was quite exceptional. The seminar itself was of high quality, and the credit goes to Professor Dasgupta and her equally gifted peers for investing so much time and effort in organizing and designing the panels. We have included a short report on the conference, despite the acute shortage of time ( the seminar concluded three days ago), beautifully put together with meticulous detail by the bright students of Shiv Nadar University, who attended all the session with rapt attention and took copious notes. However, a more full-fledged report with greater elaboration and session by session analysis will be published in the May issue of newsletter. That may enable us to understand the complexities and nuances present in the discussion with greater clarity.


Page |4 This issue appropriately titled, “New Dimensions” concentrates some of the innovative emerging trends in learning and knowledge consumption, for example the revolutionary “Hole in the Wall” project by Professor Sugata Mitra and a cutting edge digital archiving project being run by Presidency University. However, the most defining element of this issue is our profiling and highlighting of three multidisciplinary projects run by the three centres of excellence in our institution: School of Cultural Texts and Records, School of Oceanographic Studies and School of Education Technology. All of these projects are united in their attempt at crossing disciplinary barriers and embracing online resources and technological communication. Happy reading! Deepnanda Ray Piyali Chakraborty Somak Mukherjeee (Editorial Team, E-QUAL NEWS) 31 March 2015


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What We Talk about When We Talk about Quizzing Arkaprabha Chakraborty Quizzing, or at least quizzing in India, has always had to keep on top of technology as newer forms emerge. This is most likely due to the very nature of what we understand as technology in the digital age; by and large being tools whose functions are to deal with received information in a computational, presentational or archival manner as the needs dictate. Arkaprabha Chakraborty writes.

When considering quizzing, it is hard to extricate myself from and comment upon it. Although I started quizzing quite late in life (my regular team-mates have both quizzed for roughly five years longer than I have), when you become a regular at 'playing the field', it is extremely difficult to put a stop to it. After a certain point, one seems to realize that the characteristic state of a quizzer is utter desperation, whatever the situation. But preamble aside, quizzing in India has come a long way since Neil O'Brien held his question cards on the grounds of Christ the King Church in Calcutta back in 1967. However, in India the popular misconception still stands that quizzing is the precinct of those who have consistently scored well in school and college. Today, keeping room for exceptions, nothing could be further from the truth; the reason for this being that educational standards in India from the school level till the undergraduate level, tend to reward narrow, specifically delineated learning by rote in diverse subjects that gradually break off into streams containing fewer and fewer elements as they advance. Until the first board examination, a student studies for seven broad subjects which becomes five at the plus-two level, settling between two or three at the undergraduate level. At no point in the history of quizzing in India could a quizzer afford to cut loose topics of knowledge as they are forced to do in the Indian education system. But there was a time when certain elements of learning by rote was rewarded by the structures of quizzing in place. This style, popular in the early history of Indian quizzing, is fast losing ground in an age of information, barring the deprecatingly categorized genre of questions labelled '#kolstylz', implying Kolkata-style questions which, not wholly unfairly, have had a historical reputation for being frustratingly short or/and mindnumbingly esoteric. But the quizzing landscape now works upon a maxim which can be compressed to “It isn't what we know, but how we know it”. The new wave of quizzing across the country is taking a leaf out of South India's considerably large quizbook to make the pursuit far less trivial, in its most literal sense. Perhaps at this point an example of each form will make the point clearer. A typical #kolstylz question would be something like: What is the highest break that can be achieved in a game of snooker? The answer to which is “147 under normal circumstances.” The famously fastidious proponents of #kolstylz quizzing will usually not accept this answer without mention of the “normal circumstances.”


Page |6 On the other hand, a typical new wave question (for which the country is largely indebted to the Southern quizzing circuit) would read more like: Johann Georg _____ (c. 1466 - c. 1540) was an alchemist, astronomer and magician. A strange figure of the German Renaissance, there were reports of his appearances as a performer of magic tricks and reader of horoscopes all over southern Germany. The church denounced him as a blasphemer, while the city of Nurnberg denied "free passage to the great nigromancer and sodomite." He allegedly died of an alchemical explosion and his body was grievously mutilated, which his opponents believed was quite telling of his sinful existence. Fill in the blank. A real life figure, but think literary. In this instance, the answer would be “Faust.” New wave quizmasters are usually far more encouraging than their #kolstylz counterparts, and will appreciate a “good answer” even if it is incorrect. With this new style of quizzing in mind, I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that quizzing today is the greatest point of entry for non-holistic, individualistic education within recreational activity. Through simple participation, every question presents us with a head or a point which we can grasp and go in deeper to educate ourselves about, regardless of topic, whatever we find genuinely interesting. The responsibility, however, is placed on the individual. The need to know more for the utility value of doing well in a quiz is coupled with the simple need to know more, which is nourished by education. In this instance, 'education' is not a holistic, purposive indoctrination of ethics along with knowledge, but more challenging, frightening even, form of raw knowledge, which is far more individually burdensome. Carrying on with this idea, one might consider the quizzer then to be a butcher of sorts with regards to knowledge, slicing and infusing and storing the sheer excess of information that they necessarily confront, keeping the best cuts, deciding what they must discard from a never-ending carcass. That said, perhaps we can then find a mechanization simile in the gradual digitization of the process of knowledge-gleaning vis-a-vis quizzing. Quizzing, or at least quizzing in India, has always had to keep on top of technology as newer forms emerge. This is most likely due to the very nature of what we understand as technology in the digital age; by and large being tools whose functions are to deal with received information in a computational, presentational or archival manner as the needs dictate. To take an example here, Microsoft Word computes our requirement that the strings of electronic impulses being input via the keyboard be returned as recognizable characters, searches for the letters corresponding to these impulses within the parameters of the defined font from within its archive, finally presenting it to us in the desired form within the confines of a virtual space resembling a sheet of paper, which is also presentational by its very existence. The same idea works for the internet as well. Taking Google as the commonest example, a simple search makes the web servers compute what is required from within their archive to present us with an answer for our particular necessity. Hundreds of thousands of results are found in the hundredths of a second.


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PowerPoint and other presentation softwares have been the cornerstone of quizzing in the digital age

The point of intersection here being that the quizzer/quizmaster assimilates information in much the same way, computing a necessity, looking within a repository and moulding it into a presentable final form. We can see why, then, quizzers and quizmasters have to employ a form of doublethink as they simultaneously

Google's constant improvement of how we access information has the potential for both positive and negative impact on Quizzing

embrace and oppose technology in quizzing, depending on the circumstances.


Page |8 In the current situation, the quizzer/quizmaster takes recourse to technology, which employs computation, archiving and presentation in each process, in each of the components of their epistemic and their purposive paths, which requires computation, archiving and presentation in the same sense, but on a different scale.

Easy upload websites like SlideShare have made a platform for the dissemination of Presentation Software based quizzes

For the computational and formative aspect of the quizzer's game, one looks no further than the reliable starting point of Google, or at a stretch, Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a concise and ever updating collection of facts with appropriate citations


Page |9 These provide the basis of the what being looked for, with several results and entry points of information at hand. It is up to us to abstract and formulate what we require of the data given. That we input data into whatever technology results in technology putting a larger scale of data back into us, for us to shape as we will. For the archival aspect in this situation, the quizzer's haven is the hard disk at an essential level, but archiving also implies a certain sense of non-individual accessibility and thus more and more Indian quizzers turn to the website called SlideShare, a presentation hosting website to make their own quizzes freely accessible. An archive, thus, is almost always at hand for a quizzer. The presentational aspect through the ubiquitous PowerPoint is what has really changed the face of Indian amateur quizzing, though. The ability to view the question on some sort of screen was a decisive aspect in the debate about the length of a “good” question, changing the very idea of a “good” question from one that very functionally packs a small amount of information to make it a little more convenient for the quizmaster reading it out, to place emphasis upon the quizzer's ability to glean, analyze and then to correlate, and not just memorize hoping for the best. The trouble here is that the easiest way of presenting and researching for a quiz is the use of technology. Concurrently, the easiest way of cheating during a quiz is also through the use of technology and more often than not using the very same avenues. Yet quizzing with technology has been around long enough for certain aspects to have become integral to the process. The presentation with laptop, projector and speakers is indispensable these days and has also opened up the realm of audio-visual questions to non-televised amateur quizzing. Now that I think about it, it is laughably ironic to see a slide on the screen prominently declaring illegal the use of technology during the quiz. We'd be back to the question cards #kolstylz era but for the grace of Google.

Arkaprabha Chakraborty is a First Year Postgraduate student in English at Jadavpur University.


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Famine and Dearth in India and Britain, 1550-1800 Connected Cultural Histories of Food Security Professor Amlan Das Gupta, Dr Ayesha Mukherjee School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, are working with the Digital Humanities team at the University of Exeter to produce a publicly accessible website and database of selected primary sources and images relating to famine in India and Britain, 1550-1800.

Funders: AHRC and University of Exeter, UK Collaborators: University of Exeter, Jadavpur University, Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment (University of Oxford) Principal Investigator: Dr Ayesha Mukherjee, Department of English, University of Exeter Co-Investigator: Prof. Amlan Das Gupta, Department of English, Jadavpur University http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/english/research/projects/famine/ Food security is a complex and polemical issue, but its currency and importance are hardly debatable given present concerns about environmental change, resource management, and sustainability. Largely investigated within the disciplines of the sciences and social sciences, in current or very recent historical contexts, the concern about long-term availability and distribution of food, has, nevertheless, a history that can be traced far back. Temporally, this project considers food security from an early modern perspective, and geographically and culturally, it compares attitudes towards this concern in India and Britain. It aims to recover and define the practices, discourses, and literary modes through which these selected past societies articulated concerns about food availability and distribution. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, and the University of Exeter, the project started in 2014 and will run till 2016. It is led by Dr Ayesha Mukherjee (Department of English, University of Exeter) and Prof. Amlan Das Gupta (Department of English, Jadavpur University). Mukherjee, the Principal Investigator, specialises in the study of early modern literature and culture, in particular, the cultural history of famine and dearth in the historical period covered here, and her work determines the project’s research and critical directions, content, scope, and practical design. Das Gupta, the Co-Investigator, specialises in early modern literature and intellectual history and is interested in the theory and applications of digital humanities. His particular interest is in digital archives, and he has experience in putting together large repositories. Das Gupta and Mukherjee manage and coordinate the project’s activities as a whole. These activities focus on researching relevant multilingual sources held in national and local archives and libraries in Britain, Bangladesh, and India. The archival research is carried out by Mukherjee and provides the materials for the project. Besides analysing and publishing research findings in academic articles, the project


P a g e | 11 team, based at the School of Cultural Texts and Records (Jadavpur), are working with the Digital Humanities team at the University of Exeter to produce a publicly accessible website and database of selected primary sources and images relating to famine in India and Britain, 1550-1800. The web resource seeks to make available a fully searchable set of marked up files in their original languages as well as in translation. Languages dealt with include English, Latin, Persian, Brajbhasha, Bhojpuri, Magahi, Hindi and Bengali. Texts are transcribed using TEI-5 standards. The previous experience of the School of Cultural Texts and Records in creating web based repositories of texts in non-Roman alphabets has proved of value here; while the Exeter Digital Humanities Team, led by Gary Stringer, are active in the DH and TEI communities, having produced and preserved complex textual databases for a variety of funded projects. This project couples the experience and skills in mass digitisation at Jadavpur, with the rigorous TEI-based approach at Exeter, drawing on the strengths of both. A workshop on "Food Security and the Environment in India and Britain", supported by the project partner, the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford, will be held in Oxford on 3-4 September 2015 to discuss findings, and test and debate the relationship between the sources and digital technologies used to create the project's analytical framework. The workshop and web-database, therefore, also act as pathways to wider impact, creating routes whereby pre-modern cultural constructions of famine can offer provoking examples to think with. Modern environmental crises, such as climate change, have forced us to confront a post-modern relationship with famine that partly resembles its pre-modern counterpart. For this reason, the project’s comparative cultural perspective on early modern “food security” provides a different frame of reference for current debates. The project is designed to promote collaboration between scholars and institutions based in the UK and India. It draws together the distinct areas of expertise of Mukherjee and Das Gupta, giving them both time and opportunity to develop their research. It supports the career development of three Jadavpur-based research fellows Bonisha Bhattacharyya, Arshdeep Singh Brar, and Sarbajit Mitra, who are employed fulltime to transcribe and encode sources for the web-database, and to undertake and learn from specific research tasks, as defined by the project leads. Their technical work is guided by experts at the University of Exeter and Jadavpur University, Gary Stringer, Tom Rosenbloom, and Dr Spandana Bhowmik, who have previous experience of working on challenging Digital Humanities projects. The Jadavpur-based team will work in Exeter for a month, later this year, before moving on to present their findings at the workshop in Oxford. The whole team is supported by an internationally constituted Advisory Group of experienced academics. The Exeter-Jadavpur Famine Project, as it is locally known in Jadavpur, thus enables the exchange of research ideas, knowledge, and expertise beyond the local and across the seas.


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Role of Technology in Knowledge Sharing: The Case of DECCMA Sumana Banerjee Sumana Banerjee writes how working for a multi-country multidisciplinary project such as DECCMA(Deltas, Vulnerability and Climate Change : Migration and Adaptation) the bliss of technology in effective communication and sharing of knowledge enriches her experience every day

Sharing is caring and we are a caring generation as we are enthusiastically responding to the lure of the omnipresent “Share” button on social media. We are sharing selfies, check-ins, moods, life events and ideas. This craze of sharing made me realise that sharing is inherent to human nature. Happiness, grief, words, ideas, knowledge are all shared between people owing to the nature of the relationship. Traditionally, a teacher-student relationship was perceived to have a unidirectional flow of knowledge where the teachers share their knowledge with the students and the role of the students is that of an absorbent sponge. Thanks to some encouraging teachers that this perception has considerably been altered. Many teachers admit to learning from their students’ responses, thus giving knowledge sharing a bidirectional flow. Since time immemorial, this knowledge sharing has been at the root of academic researches where teams of research scholars guided by the professors and investigators have stimulated their brain cells to find solutions to their research problems. Historically, the researchers have learnt from each other, the teams have come together to validate the learning and finally the outcomes have been disseminated to a larger audience. Communication is one of the crucial tools in running research projects smoothly. To facilitate knowledge sharing, communication has to be prompt, clear and strong. If research teams of a single project were based at different geographical locations, communication would get disrupted as letters would often get delayed and if the research was a multi-country one, the cost of making international calls to address a certain issue would hit the roof without making any promises about the clarity of the call. For young researchers today, such situations are unthinkable due to the boon of technology. Communication is easy with the aid of the internet and knowledge is being shared round the clock. Being a part of a multi-country multidisciplinary project such as DECCMA, the bliss of technology in effective communication and sharing of knowledge enriches my work experience every day. DECCMA (DEltas, Vulnerability and Climate Change : Migration and Adaptation) is a multidisciplinary project under the research programme titled CARIAA (Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia) which is jointly funded by UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) and Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC). The project is led by the University of Southampton (Soton). The lead institutions in each country are Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) for Bangladesh, University of Ghana for Ghana and Jadavpur University (JU) for India. Spread across 3 continents and 4 time zones, running a research project like this would have been difficult had it not been for the boon named internet! Emails, Skype calls, Google Hangouts, feeding in monthly progress via Google forms, responding to Doodle Polls and answering questionnaires keep us on our toes day in and day out. Monthly catch ups with Soton, work package (WP) meetings with the WP leads, DECCMA Management


P a g e | 13 Committee (DMC) meetings are held every month over Skype or Hangout. When a lot of people face the music for using Facebook or Twitter during office hours, my work encourages me to use social media for disseminating the project news! Updating about upcoming events is always a tweet away and sharing relevant articles is a retweet away. The project has a Twitter account (@DECCMA) and for better communication every country team is encouraged to have one. DECCMA-India (@DECCMAIndia) has followed suit and is new on Twitter. By a simple click on the Follow button on Twitter accounts of relevant organisations involved in research on climate change, migration and adaptation, and subsequently reading their tweets enriches the pool of knowledge and further enhances the scope of researching more to lead to development of knowledge. For any multi-country research project, knowledge management plays a pivotal role. As a part of the CARIAA Program, DECCMA has the advantage of using the Knowledge Management Platform. The Google Apps for Business edition on the cariaa.net domain are available to Consortia members of the four projects and IDRC to better facilitate CARIAA Consortia’s communication and coordination processes within and between each other. KM is about how the CARIAA Consortia will communicate and coordinate within and between each other, and with the CARIAA Project Team as program activities are implemented, research evidence is generated, and lessons are learned. This approach enables sharing research findings within the program and learning from the unique findings from research overlaps with the other projects. CARIAA mentions that this emphasis on a shared evidence base and collaboration in drawing from it is central to CARIAA’s programmatic (rather than project-oriented) approach. The home page of the platform looks like this:


P a g e | 14 Since the CARIAA Program supports collaborative research to inform adaptation policy and practice that will build the resilience of vulnerable populations and their livelihoods across hot spots in Africa and Asia, the four projects that are funded under it have their target areas for the research as Large Deltas, Glacier-fed River Basins and Semi-Arid Zones. The site features different sections for each consortium, namely, ASSAR (Adaptation at Scale in Semi-Arid Regions), DECCMA (DECCMA - Deltas, Vulnerability and Climate Change: Migration and Adaptation), HI-AWARE (Himalayan Adaptation, Water and Resilience) and PRISE (Pathways to Resilience in Semi-Arid Economies). There are also sections for a number of Working Groups which are common to every project. Under the Country Engagement section the countries where multiple consortia are functional, namely, Bangladesh, Ghana, India, Kenya and Pakistan have their respective pages to facilitate cross consortia engagement within the countries. The home page of the platform features relevant News as posted by the members, Calendar that features upcoming events under the CARIAA Program, latest tweets from CARIAA (@CollabAdapt). Each Consortium’s page resembles the structure of the home page of CARIAA with sections on Recent News, Working Documents, Calendar and Tweets. Under the section Working Documents, folders are categorized based on each participating country, work package, meetings general resources using Google Drive. This feature enables smooth sharing of project documents, relevant articles, e-books, and reports etc. which are easily accessible by members at any point of time and saves the time spent on searching for relevant articles online. The Calendar can be added to one’s email account and synced across devices which minimises the chances of missing a deadline or a meeting. Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is an important part of any project and this task has been streamlined with the use of this KM Platform. Each country is expected to enter their outputs under the heads of Research, Engagement and Capacity using Google forms. Peer-reviewed papers, non-peer-reviewed papers (including working papers), briefs (policy or research), book chapters, books, data products, blogs/other web-based articles, multimedia products (rich maps, videos, games, etc.), innovations or conference papers need to be included under the Research head. Engagement events primarily focussing on engagement with stakeholders, media tracking based on number of twitter followers, number of hits and capacity of each consortium are also recorded on the forms. Users can view the running data and review the existing log files to avoid duplication during entering data. Finally, all these data are collated and archived quarterly. With a user-friendly approach enabled by the bliss of technology and dedicated people to upload these data , writing reports based on M&E outputs is no longer an uphill task. Thus, technology has not only aided in sharing of knowledge but also enriched the functioning of the DECCMA project and the entire CARIAA Program. Technology can only aid in the process but the key to make knowledge sharing organic lies in one’s urge to know more and broaden one’s horizon.

Sumana Banerjee is currently working as the Project Coordinator for DECCMA India Consortium.


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Development of Web based Teaching materials (Engineering) for Undergraduate and Post-Graduate Laboratory at Jadavpur University: An Overview of “TRAILS” Project Angshumitra Ghosh Angshumitra Ghosh talks about the scope of tech-enabled learning that has been envisioned through the TRAILS project [an UGC University with Potential for Excellence (UPE) Phase-II project, Jadavpur University] and the way it intends to benefit engineering students in understanding lab experiments through interactive simulations.

Introduction Jadavpur University is one of the premier institutions in India, especially in the field of technical education, and emphasizes on practical methods of learning like workshops and laboratory experiments. For that matter, laboratory experiments form an integral part of the curriculum for any undergraduate degree program in any engineering discipline. They provide the students with an opportunity to develop their practical skills before they step into the industrial world. Students also get to compare their theoretical knowledge with the results obtained through experimentation, thereby enhancing their overall knowledge. However scope for individual experimentation is often restricted due to several factors, such as risks associated with working in high voltage laboratories, or limited number of expensive equipments being available for experimentation. To overcome this dearth of laboratory resource setups, students have to often work in large groups. It is also not uncommon that they have to perform experiments before the related theoretical concepts have been taught in class. Thus, it is often difficult for students to comprehend the theoretical concepts illustrated by these experiments. Over the years, this lack of understanding on the part of students has been bridged by means of standing lectures given by teachers before the commencement of the laboratory classes. However, these lectures delivered year after year, for each group of students, and also by different teachers may not be at the same standard. Meanwhile, in the last few decades there has been a rapid advancement in the field of information and communication technology (ICT) that has contributed to the growth of open learning. Web-based dissemination methods have gained in popularity due to the increasing availability and wider reach of internet. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) that aim unlimited participation and open access to educational courses via Web are the trend.


P a g e | 16 School of Education Technology School of Education Technology was set up in 1988 by Jadavpur University with an objective to carry out research and development in different aspects of Teaching-Learning processes, and to experiment with new dissemination methodologies for enhancing the quality of education in India. ‘Development of Web-based Teaching Materials (Engineering) for Undergraduate and Post-Graduate Laboratory' is one such project being currently executed at the School, under the UGC Scheme “University with Potential for Excellence Phase II”. The project has been initiated with a vision to promote blended mode of learning, by using Webbased dissemination methods to supplement conventional methods of teaching and learning. Appreciating the importance of Open Learning, it was perceived that Web-based resources for the engineering laboratories could be used as effective means for knowledge preservation, dissemination and utilization. These resources would prove to be beneficial for students, who could refer to these materials prior to coming for the laboratory classes. TRAILS As part of this project, a J2EE based application named TRAILS (acronym for Teaching Resources And Interactive Laboratory Simulations) has been developed, which aims to improve the general awareness of the engineering students from different disciplines about the laboratory experiments that they perform at the University. The TRAILS Web application will facillitate students to imbibe working knowledge of experiments through the use of various teaching/learning resources, such as multimedia based illustration of theoretical concepts, video lectures by domain experts, video demonstration of the experiment procedures, as well as handson interactive simulations. These diverse modes of learning will not only supplement each other, but also cater to the different cognitive style preferences of the students. The Web application uses a template driven approach for integrating the components developed for each laboratory experiment, that is referred to as a module in the context of this project. The XML-based framework used for the application helps to segregate the content of each module from the presentation style and also provides scalability and flexibility to adapt to future needs. The TRAILS application along with different modules will be gradually integrated into the Digital Library repository of the University, thus enabling students to access these educational resources without facing the constraints of time and location. In the first phase, about a dozen such modules have been developed for


P a g e | 17 the undergraduate electrical and electronics laboratories, such that they can cater to a large number of students from different engineering disciplines Functional Design for TRAILS Application Each experiment is considered as a module that has been categorized under the broad heads, based on the engineering discipline to which the experiment belongs, such as Electrical Engineering Laboratory, Basic Electronics Laboratory, and so on.

TRAILS Home page

Each module consists of six broad sections or functional components viz. Theory, Lecture, Procedure, Simulation, Report & FAQ., as detailed below:


P a g e | 18 1. Theory:

Sample Theory Page

The basic theory behind each experiment is presented to the user through static text, supplemented with graphic images and animations illustrating the required concepts. The text is presented to the learner in small chunks at a time in a hyperlinked manner.


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2. Lecture:

Sample Lecture Page

In this section, the user is able to view video recording of lectures by experienced teachers, explaining theoretical concepts related to the experiment and the procedure to perform the experiment.


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3. Procedure:

Sample Procedure Page

This ‘Procedure’ section consists of multiple videos, demonstrating the step-wise procedure for performing the experiment. The user can easily navigate to any of the videos via a tree structured menu.


P a g e | 21 4. Simulation: This section consists of interactive simulations and/or animated demonstrations.

Sample Simulation Page

It has been established from past research that the use of 3D objects in user interfaces helps in the creation of a simulated environment very similar to the real world and this realistic experience augments the cognitive functions of the human brain. Further, user-interactivity also helps in increasing knowledge retention. Keeping this in mind, interactive simulations have been designed where the entire laboratory setup for each experiment has been totally simulated through software. Using simple mouse clicks in the simulated environment, users are able to connect instruments through wires, and make the circuit for experimentation. They can also provide inputs and observe outputs, similar to that obtained while performing the actual experiment. For example, user may click on the knob of the inductor to mimic the real movement of the inductor, and change the values of circuit parameters (resistance, inductance and capacitance) accordingly.


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Sample screenshot from an animation

3D animations have also been used to demonstrate the process of building the circuit for experimentation. This is an innovative approach to make a student relate a schematic circuit diagram with the actual experiment set up in a laboratory. 1. Report

Sample Report Page


P a g e | 23 The Report section provides guidelines to help students prepare the report after performing an experiment. Sample reports including tabulated dummy data, and corresponding graphs are displayed, wherever applicable 2. FAQ:

Sample FAQ Page

The FAQ section displays a set of frequently asked questions and related answers. The questions are presented to the user one at a time, along with the corresponding answer. User can navigate to the previous or next question in the set, if the same exists. From the functional design of the application, it is evident that students can choose from different modes of learning as per his or her preference. Using multiple options, students will be induced to recall the same knowledge at different points of time, once again resulting in enhanced knowledge retention. Application Development The TRAILS Web application has been developed using the Java platform (Java 6.0) and deployed in Apache Tomcat 6.0 Web server. It has been developed using the Java Struts 2 framework which implements the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture using Java Beans as model, JSP as view and Action classes as controller. In addition, Adobe Creative Suite has been used for creating static images for the Web portal, preparing multimedia presentations, animations and interactive simulations, and for the recording and editing of videos. The 3D Models for different entities, as well as 3D animations for better visualization and creation of realworld like experience for users, have been developed using Autodesk 3D Studio MAX.


P a g e | 24

Sample 3D Models

The development of each module requires active involvement from teachers of the University who act as domain experts (also referred to as Knowledge Resources) and provide the necessary knowledge inputs. The Education Technologists at the School of Education Technology guide the development team by providing valuable insights on the use of effective pedagogy and help transform the content to a format suitable for Web presentation.

Conclusion The TRAILS application will encourage open learning by providing easy access to information over the Web and enabling students to learn about laboratory experiments at their own pace. The Web-based multimedia resources and interactive simulations for the engineering laboratories will help the students to increase their ability to grasp the related technical know-how. However, the current endeavour, with limited resources, is targeted for the engineering students of Jadavpur University only. If the feedback received from the students is positive, it could be scaled up to reach out to a wider audience in future. It has also been envisaged that the application will be made compatible for mobile and hand-held devices in future, in order to increase the outreach to students.

Angshumitra Ghosh is Project Manager for TRAILS Project at School of Education Technology, Jadavpur University


P a g e | 25

The TRAILS Team Principal Investigator

: Dr. Matangini Chattopadhyay, School of Education Technology

Co-Principal Investigators : Prof. Samar Bhattacharya, School of Education Technology and Dr. Ranjan Parekh, School of Education Technology Development Team Project Managers

: Angshumitra Ghosh, Panchali Sen

Senior Research Fellow

: Rumela Basu

Multimedia Technicians

: Ranjta Mookherjee, Santanu Ray, Selim Sekh, Kunal Hossain and Manidipa Saha


P a g e | 26

Digital Pedagogy: A Step Towards a Smarter Future in Education and Archival Research Kush Sengupta A team of researchers led by Dr. Souvik Mukherjee of Department of English. Presidency University are now engaged in a major joint collaborative project with the Kolkata Scottish Heritage Trust which aims to accommodate not only Digital Humanities into the pedagogic practises but also rethinking pedagogy in a digital way. Kush Sengupta writes.

Dr. Souvik Mukherjee, professor of English department, Presidency University, Kolkata is one of those few academics in India who have persistently underscored the need to accommodate internet as a methodological tool into the study of Humanities. Trained as a Renaissance scholar, he later branched out to Game Studies and Digital Humanities. He teaches English Literature at Presidency University full-time and also works on game development and the creation of online archives. The project “Dutch in Bengal”, a kind of pioneer in its field of heritage conservation and digitization of cemetery records, was completed under him. He is now engaged in digitizing the Scottish Cemetery at Park Circus, a joint collaborative project with The Kolkata Scottish Heritage Trust. He aims to accommodate “not only Digital Humanities into the pedagogic practises but also rethinking pedagogy in a digital way.” His engagement with Digital Humanities started at Jadavpur University under Prof. Amlan Dasgupta. Since then, he has been working for the School Of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur on and off. He has also worked closely with Dr. Dasgupta for the “Bichitra Project”. At Nottingham Trent, where he studied after Jadavpur, he worked as an assistant editor for a journal that focused on Digital Writing and Technicity following the ideas of Derrida and Stigler. “Digital Humanities is a very nebulous term for me,” he clarifies. His engagement with the discipline is rather incidental. He has worked as storyboard writer for games and in e-learning departments in universities. He alerts us about the turn that Digital Humanities is taking, where it is not only about archiving and textual studies, but also studying digital cultures. “This is where I come in… my brand of Digital Humanities is different from Jadavpur…” He stresses on the need for an interdisciplinary approach in Digital Humanities and how it covers a vast range of disciplines and not “...Digital English Studies or Digital Film Studies only, which Digital Humanities 1.0 tends to gravitate towards…” He refuses to describe himself as a Digital Archivist, but someone who incidentally happens to work in the field. On the progress of Digital Humanities study in India, he mentions South East Asian Digital Humanities (SADH) curated by Dr. Padmini Ray Murray, Vinayak Dasgupta and Dr. Mukherjee himself. He joined Presidency because of the institution’s “major interest in Digital Humanities”. He also mentions Shiv Nadar University in Delhi, his ex-employer, which has done some work in Digital Pedagogy. He considers Jadavpur University as a pioneer in the field of Digital Humanities in India with projects like Bichitra, E-Qual, Daftaripara by Prof. Nilanjana Gupta and Dr. Abhijit Roy. “I have just come out of a class… where we were discussing how social media influences the way we perceive society…how writing micro-fiction on Facebook affects the culture of narratives.” Through


P a g e | 27 such lectures he “evangelizes” young minds on the necessity of looking into ways how cyber technology is slowly transforming that way we perceive Humanities. Speaking about the project of digitizing the Dutch cemetery of Chinsurah, he mentions the “chance conversation” with Dutch officials who showed interest in digitizing the Dutch cemetery, an ASI protected site in Chinsurah, a suburb of Hooghly. The website contains a comprehensive list of the tombs in the cemetery as well as a transcription of the epitaphs along with the short biography of the people in the cemetery, if available. The result is a veritable treasure of a comprehensive list of who’s-who of Dutch Chinsurah, a neglected aspect of colonial history of Bengal. Dr. Mukherjee not only digitized the Dutch graves but also the other English and Armenian graves, and the result is a curious archive which reveals many previously unknown facts about Dutch-British social interactions and other marginal colonial parties like the Armenians. This archive would be immensely helpful to anyone who would seek to research on colonial Bengal. He is currently engaged in digitizing the Scottish Cemetery, trying to create a large database. He has also been approached by the Jewish and Armenian communities for similar archiving of their cemeteries in Bengal. Thus, he is a trendsetter of sorts, digitizing the valuable information of colonial rule in India which was almost at the point of being lost. He had to build a team for digitizing the cemetery from scratch. The students had almost no training in digital archiving. “The main job was to teach them sanctity of data…and not to record data based on value judgements,” he said. Whenever he spotted an error, he corrected them personally. This made his students follow suit and the errors were minimized soon. They had to deal with not only logistical difficulties but also with the actual threat of snakes and other sorts of living dangers in the cemetery compound. They also had to improvise and use towels to photograph the tombstones as strong sunlight made them quite impossible to photograph. The entire work was done in 4-5 months and seven visits to the site. The team made by him is in place and carrying out work in the Scottish cemetery at a rapid pace. Transcriptions can be boring, he admits, “But one must learn to copy data and also to understand how transcriptions can be advantageous later on when the platform just comes together.” He hopes that the websites can be kept alive and the archive accessible for anyone who is interested. Apart from digitizing cemeteries, he is also working on “Women and Gaming” and a meet on the same topic is scheduled to be held at Park Street, Kolkata. He also carried out a large survey on the gaming scenario in Kolkata under Dr. Padmini Ray Murray. He is also working with Prof. Milinda Banarjee trying to digitally recreate the history of Bishnupur, West Bengal. The Digital Humanities Undergraduate gen-ed course at Presidency, the first of its kind in India, was also started by him. While his classes have got mixed reviews, he rues the lack of digital culture in India. Some students were indeed bright and receptive, he also speaks about the misconceptions of students who take up the course thinking it to be a “Spoken-English course”, as it was offered by the English Department. There is an urgent need to view this as a separate discipline, he stresses, which incorporates all the branches of Humanities, and not English alone. He has worked with students from Bengali, History, English and Philosophy departments of Presidency to tap the varied expertise of the students and not confine him to English Literature students, “from where most Digital Humanists tend to come from.” This inclusive effort is tougher in other bigger universities and there is an urgent need for disseminating digital culture across departments. His challenge is to now introduce Python and other digital languages so that people “feel more empowered to make their own data processing.” Dr. Mukherjee is, however, unsure about the change this will be able to make. “Indians are notorious in not keeping records, a national malaise,” he says. He hopes that the advent of internet would make people keep records for future generations. Exclusivity is also an impediment in the spread of Digital


P a g e | 28 Humanities. “The biggest problem for Digital Humanities here is that people don’t work together.” He lauds projects like E-Qual which is collaborative and thus a step in that direction. He is still unsure about how Digital Humanities has reached grassroots stage. “Presidency and Jadavpur are both elite institutions,” he says, stressing the need for more home-grown Digital Humanists. Fear of anything digital is a huge factor. There are still stigmas attached to the use of net for pedagogy. The greatest problem with Digital Humanities is that “It’s still a part-time profession; there are no full-fledged Digital Humanists in India because there are no jobs for them.” The diploma course in Digital Humanities offered by Jadavpur University mostly attracts people from English departments “who merely take up the course to attend classes by their favourite teachers.” There is also no effort to engage the industry. He also rues the absence of crowd funded projects in India like the West. Lack of publicity is also crippling the efforts to launch this as a serious discipline. There is also no dialogue with the government with its keen interest in digital technology. The government can fund but it is only when exemplars like Jadavpur University make Digital Humanities more visible, “then money will flow in…as academics must connect these dots.” Asked about the future of Digital Humanities in India, he stressed on its indispensable status in the years to come. “But people are still making up their minds about it.”

Kush Sengupta is a First year Postgraduate student in English at Jadavpur University


P a g e | 29

Where did the Teachers Go? “Hole in the Wall” and the Future of Learning Barnamala Roy Sugata Mitra's illuminating talk at Presidency University identified structural failing of the education system tracing its roots to Althusser's model of the Ideological State Apparatus, churning out citizens who are but mere tools for the uncontested functioning of the state. Barnamala Roy covered the event for E-QUAL News

Professor Sugata Mitra from the Department of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, England and prominently recognized for his Hole in the Wall experiment debated the question of the teacher's role in a technological "Future of Learning" (as his talk was titled) at Presidency University on 11th March, 2015. Mitra has focused his works on areas like Learning and Memory and was the among the first to show that simulated neural networks can aid in deciphering the mechanisms of Alzheimer's disease. Referring to an instance when he put a few children's education documents under 'Wordle' (an application that increases the point size of words of frequent occurrence to demarcate the important and the unimportant) and noticed the absence of the word 'teacher', Mitra suggested an alternative title for his talk- "Where did the teachers go?" Mitra introduces obsolescence as a long-standing feature of the education system, especially in India and proceeds to trace the origins of the system in the age of empires. Technology has been existent only for the past hundred years while a thousand years of empire functioned before that with the aid of people and animals. In molding children into soldiers, the properties they are inculcated with are that of homogeneity, the ability to understand and execute orders or obedience and noncurriculum and the typical properties of clerkship like transferring and manipulating data, never questioning orders, writing legibly and identically and never being creative. He identifies schools as the engines that prepare these soldiers and clerks in a reliable fashion enabling empires to flourish for years. However, in the last one year hundred years when the world has been experimenting with government systems, such knowledge which imparts homogeneity has become obsolete since it is infeasible for procuring solutions to problems.


P a g e | 30 Mitra's identified structural failing of the education system adheres to Althusser's model of the Ideological State Apparatus churning out citizens who are but mere tools for the uncontested functioning of the state. The question of individuality, which when debunked in the Althusserian model could at least serve the state, but it will not even be state-friendly now because of the plethora of problems which the demands of the 21st century have heralded. Dematerialization which happened in fairy tales regularly occurs now as the record player, fountain pen, slide rule, camera and atlas have all entered the cell phone. Mitra uses the metaphor of the transportation evolution to suggest a future of learning by tracing how, with discovery of the internal combustion engine, the coachman disappeared and the passengers became drivers. The construction of roads, implementation of traffic police and license was only to aid the new role of the passengers-as-drivers while the coachman never returned. Positing the example of a recent model of car which drives itself, he alludes to a movement into the post postmodern world where what goes away is not the driver but the driving. Having framed the philosophy behind his path breaking "Hole in the Wall" experiment, Mitra delves into a discussion of it's foundation. In 1999, the hypothesis of his experiment was tested by curving a hole in the wall in the slums of Kalkaji, New Delhi and inserting a freely accessible computer into the hole. While the team prepared itself for mishaps in the form of wreckage of the computer or losing interest, they observed that the children had opened a browser within a few hours. The dearth of technical language to describe their experience of operating the computer made them appropriate a metaphoric description- to them, the 'teer' (arrow) turns into a hand followed by a rotation of the Shiva's drum. The technique was applied on children from a slum in Hyderabad to train them in English pronunciation. The teachers at the local schools where the children were admitted spoke in Telegu accented English, impairing the pronunciation among their students so that when they went for


P a g e | 31 interviews in later life, they were rejected on the basis of faulty communication. To cater to this crisis, Mitra's team left them a computer with the Dragon Dictate Program and asked the children to speak to the device till it recognized their speech and typed legible words. Negotiating the initial phase of incoherence, the children discovered and downloaded the Speaking Oxford Dictionary to aid them in their speech. The inference from this experiment where children emerged with drastic improvement in their pronunciations was that in the lack of provided methods, children invent them- the pedagogy of learning can be best understood by the learners whereas the teachers can act only on a basis of statistical analysis. A similar experiment, perhaps of an increased level of ambitiousness was performed on 12 year olds in Kalipuppam (as recorded in the film 2006-2013-Beyond the Hole in the Wall) with incompetent English speaking skills. The curiosity that drove the team was that can Tamil speaking 12 year olds learn the biotechnology of DNA replication all by themselves from a street side computer? Mitra was certain that the concepts which were taught to first year Science undergraduates in college would be impossible for remote local school children to grasp and so, when they failed in two consecutive tests he would conduct within a gap of a few months, he would utilize the reports to argue for the indispensability of a teacher. Within a few months, he learnt that the children had not submitted to the frustration that accompanied the exceeding difficulty level of the learning process without a guide, but had grasped that improper replication of the DNA caused diseases. While the success rate recorded by Mitra's teams hint at the mastering of knowledge in absence of the teacher is not a far cry, the incompatibilities of learners with this method, if not dismissed, has not been debated over. How many children hailing from diverse economic and social backgrounds are self motivated enough to not lose interest without being monitored? Education can barely be imposed on the unwilling, true, but how does one decide which system of education suits whom? Here the question comes down from the collective to the individual, revolving around the manner in which one is motivated. To encourage self-tutoring children, Sugata Mitra came up with the concept of the Granny Cloud which follows granny techniques of admiration as opposed to the disciplining strictness of parents and teachers. For the experiment in Kalipuppam, Mitra had appointed a 22 year old woman (who had no science training in school to equip her in aiding the children) as the granny who would stand back as the children accessed the material on the computer and reward them with an admiring attitude to instill in them the confidence vital to progress. Catapulted to media attention when the movie Slumdog Millionaire (which was inspired by the Hole in the Wall experiment) was nominated for the Oscars, Mitra made an appeal in an interview for The Guardian- if you are a British grandmother with a computer and webcam, can you give me one hour a week? The response was gratifying enough for Mitra's team to materialize the idea of SOLE (Self Organized Learning Experience) classrooms where furniture is rearranged to accommodate 25 children at 5 computers. The drawback which Mitra mentions with this arrangement is where does the chaotic situation go when the teacher is merely the observer? In the talk "School in the Cloud: What happened after TED prize 2013" (uploaded on YouTube), Mitra shares the children's sentiments regarding Skype interactions in the SOLE-s: when asked why they are fond of SOLE classrooms, they replied that they could switch off the adults if they wished to. This liberty of dismissing authority in the learning process completely debunks the panoptical gaze of the teachers which was supposed to ensure discipline. The SOLE classrooms can evolve as counter-sites or sites of "effectively enacted utopia" where all real sites are "simultaneously represented, contested and inverted" which Foucault identifies as "heteropia" in "Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias" and the viability of such spaces becomes more apparent in the demonstrative pictures which Mitra uses. He shows us the photo of an office of the 1910-s and that of an examination hall in recent times for us to perceive the striking similarity in the two structures where a manager and a teacher maintains police supervision. With the achievement of significant technological changes, the work needed in factories, offices or multinational companies has


P a g e | 32 undergone a sea change but the ways to equip and produce people deemed fit for these workplaces have not yet evolved. While the SOLE classrooms magnify the challenges of assessment in such a system where peers are deemed more fit to assess than the absent-present teachers, Mitra emphasizes on the lack of credibility in the present way of testing students. According to him, allowing the Internet into the exam hall will change the entire system as the capability of memorizing factual knowledge which forms the base of the present examination structure will be challenged. It will necessitate that teachers ask better questions- the answers to which the Internet would not provide for example, the why and how rather than the what questions. This dynamic evolution will prepare the students with the necessary brainstorming and problem-solving skills indispensible in today's jobs. After the TED talk "School in the Cloud" in 2013, Mitra received the TED prize which he utilized in the construction of seven labs or schools to test the idea of self-organized learning- five in India and two in England. Mitra's vision for the schools in the clouds are a modified version of the home-schooling predicted in Isaac Asimov's The Fun They Had, the difference being in the fact that the former advocates the advantages of such a system while the latter seems to insinuate at the failings. Tommy and Marge's mechanical teacher in the story underline the basic problem in the SOLE system where the ethical development of the child is not prioritized. Sugata Mitra's reply to such a speculation was that applications will be designed to quiz the students with what-if situations. In an experiment performed on some children earlier, they had been given a situation where a stone was blocking the road and people were circumnavigating it without attempting to remove it. A man on his way to an interview stumbles on the stone and proceeds to remove it. The question was whether this man's decision was proper considering he had an interview for which he had to be punctual to which most of the children answered in the affirmative. While the need for reforming the current school systems is undeniable, what the revolution will ensure remains open to debates.

Barnamala Roy is a first year Post-graduate student in English at Presidency University, Kolkata


P a g e | 33

Enabling Pedagogies in Higher Education in India, E-QUAL Project Conference March 26 and 27, 2015, Shiv Nadar University Report prepared by Gayathri Menon (B.Sc. Economics, First year), Gokulnath Govindan (B.A. English, Second year), Paramjeet Kaur (M. A. English), and, Ranjit Raj (B. Tech Mechanical Engg, Final year) – students of Shiv Nadar University This was the first E-QUAL Project Conference organised by Shiv Nadar University that hoped to understand the classroom in Indian universities and schools. The conference was inaugurated by Nikhil Sinha, The Vice Chancellor of Shiv Nadar University. He drove home the point that this conference aimed at probing into the various opportunities that a comprehensive higher education system could present to Indians. Amarjeet Sinha, Additional Secretary of MHRD, who was the Chief Guest for the day, had his thoughts aligned across similar lines. He reiterated that while diversity is widespread, aspirations are similar, and gave the perfect opening to a series of paper presentations that encapsulated the dream of the morrow. The keynote address by Shiv Vishwanathan on “Pedagogies for the Imagination: Thought Experiments with Knowledge” was chaired by Nikhil Sinha, Vice Chancellor, Shiv Nadar University. He began the talk with the ironic history of education in India. For eons, education has been seen as a mere instrument and not as a means for accomplishing something. Vishwanathan highlighted the importance of looking at pedagogies as a means to enable imagination. The first panel called “Ideas in Higher Education” was chaired by Jaideep Chatterjee (Shiv Nadar University) and comprised two papers - Supurna Dasgupta’s “Kaaj kori anondey”: Happiness, Work and Pedagogy: Preliminary Reflections on Tagore’s “Eastern University” and Asim Siddqui’s “Limits of normativity in enabling authentic pedagogies: teaching-learning of ethical concepts”. Dasgupta, currently an MPhil scholar from University of Delhi, drew several insights from Tagore’s essay on Eastern University and his ideas on happiness, work and leisure. Through this paper, she looked at education as an empowering mechanism and examined the extent to which Tagore’s tapovan model can accommodate the dynamics of a classroom of a developing country like India. Asim Siddqui’s paper highlighted the importance of a dialectical engagement between normativity and authenticity for enabling pedagogies in higher education. Currently a doctoral candidate at the Philosophy of Education, Manipal Center for Philosophy and Humanities, Karnataka, he elaborated on how normativity demands complete conformity from its subjects and thus sets out to ignore a person’s development. This discussion led some academicians to question about the fields where practice is not important. But in such cases, Siddiqui underlined the relevance of experience as it acts as a key for self-reflection. Thus, it was agreed upon that experiential component forms the crux of pedagogy. This was followed by the panel called “Assessment and Learning”. This panel, chaired by Girish Agrawal (Shiv Nadar University) included three speakers - Mary Webb (King’s College London), S. Kumaresan (University of Hyderabad), Jaideep Chatterjee (Shiv Nadar University). The panel spoke of the importance of assessment and its criticality for pedagogy. Webb’s paper “Designing assessment to enhance learning: sharing, adapting and piloting assessment models in the E-QUAL project” presented


P a g e | 34 key ideas about formative assessment like students "questioning" the tests to improve their learning objectives. One of the challenges, she says is to create a culture in which a student is happy to say "I don't quite understand that. Can you explain that to me?" Kumaresan’s paper “Suggestions for Improved Tea ching and Assessment Learnt from MTTS Programme”, discussed the reasons for the conception of the Mathematics Training and Talent Search Programme--a summer training program aimed to improve the quality of students applying for a PhD in mathematics. Chatterjee’s “Assessing Assessment: calculability and the production of knowledge”, began with the compulsion faced by universities all over the world since the last decade to adopt Academic Assessment Processes or Outcome Assessments (OAs) to check the effectiveness of the courses and programmes. Chatterjee spoke of the criticisms faced by such processes like threat to the academic freedom of the faculty and a corporatization of the university. During the discussion, the chair presented an instance where a fluid course structure was adopted for his course on “Sustainable Infrastructure” where at the end of the course students were graded by their own selves on the judgement of the efforts they had spent on the course and the learning that had come out of it to them. The final panel of the day “Practical Pedagogies” was chaired by Paromita Goswami (Shiv Nadar University) and included papers such as “One Poem, Many Stories’ by Aadya Kaktikar (Shiv Nadar University), and, “Equity in the Classroom – Pedagogy For Today’s Learners” by Priti Joshi (University of Delhi). While Aadya Kaktikar looks into her Abhinay class that focuses on understanding dance as an area of study, Priti Joshi attempts to answer the question of whether equity is possible in a classroom. They claim that an equity in a classroom is only possible if there is a metacognitive interaction with students taking charge of their own learning. The discussion after both the panels revolved around questions such as what would have happened if the students of the dance class would have no technique of their own to whether there were other methods that were possible to improve methods of communication among student and teachers in other fields. The second day of the conference had Shivali Tukdeo from NIAS Bangalore as the keynote speaker. Tukdeo’s address ‘The Pedagogic Project of Indian Higher Education: Reconstruction, Reforms and Justice’ was chaired by Anannya Dasgupta (Shiv Nadar University). Dasgupta invited Dennis Dambo, the Head of research and innovation of the European Union, to share his views on higher education in India, before beginning the day’s events. Dambo begins his speech with a sense of intrigue by the fact that some Indian colleges such as Shiv Nadar University focus on research which indeed is common in Europe but is not seen in India. He argues that knowledge is not just limited to academic feats but also helps in solving societal challenges.


P a g e | 35 Shivali Tukdeo begins her presentation by asserting that in the conversation of changes and shifts in the landscape of higher education today that has seen tremendous diversity the question one needs to ask is what are the ways in which we contribute to the kind of knowledge and literacies that do justice to the diversity seen today? She asserts that one must move towards a critical pedagogy that takes note of the diversity and focuses on multicultural education. The discussion that followed this dealt with the dichotomy of dealing with treating different people in the context of equality to which Shivali pointed out that it would be wonderful if we could treat everyone equally but since we cannot do so one needs to take notice of these differences but make sure that there is no hierarchy in these differences. The first panel called “Technologies of Pedagogy” was chaired by Partha Chatterjee and comprised papers “Addressing Cognitive and Cultural Challenges through Tech Enabled Blended Learning: Some Lessons for E-QUAL” by Deepananda Ray, Piyali Chakraborty, Somak Mukherjee, Arunashish Acharya from Jadavpur University, and, “An Insight into Practice, Outcomes and Challenges of a Shift from Pedagogy to Paragogy: A BITS Pilani Case Study” by Suman Luhach and Pushp Lata from BITS Pilani. Digitisation has taken the world by storm and changed the face of pedagogics that had persisted before the ubiquity of technology became pronounced. The first paper presented by the Education Technology Team of Jadavpur University comprising gave insights into tech enabled blended learning, covering aspects of diversity and multiplicity to incorporate a blended mode of learning. This perfectly captures the concept of paragogy or peer learning, which can be enhanced through the usage of social network as a means to propagate and promulgate information. The BITS Pilani Case Study presented by Suman Luhach and Pushp Lata traces this shift from pedagogy to paragogy. Partha Chatterjee of the Department of Economics, Shiv Nadar University, who was the Chair for the panel raised a valid point about how virtual discussions can also help to efface the negative effects of peer pressure on the student. Although the picture painted by paragogical modes of learning is not replete with rosy paradigms of success, it could be concluded from the discussions that interactivity in the blended learning realm could be utilised to ensure maximum leveraging of learnability for the individual. The second panel, “Digital Learning”, chaired by Samuel Berthet (Shiv Nadar University), had two papers – “The Other Side of Digitization” by Sunandita Ghosh and Sammya Mukhopadhyay (Jadavpur University), and, “From Passive Acceptance to Active Engagement: Digital Disruptions in the Classroom” by Usha Raman (University of Delhi). The first set of speakers Sunandita and Sammya look into how rapid digitization has resulted in homogenisation of multiple narratives into one single narrative thereby making it impossible for different interpretations to survive. Usha Raman’s paper in contrast to the previous presentation is not much about the digital as in influencing the digital in the class room.


P a g e | 36 The discussion that followed the talk mainly focused on the topic of whether the role of teacher becomes redundant in the process of digitalisation. Although most of the participants agreed that a good teacher is indeed someone who makes herself redundant, they did claim that a complete absence should not happen. The third panel of the day was called “Pedagogies that Travel” and had Gita Chadha from University of Mumbai and Maya Rao from Shiv Nadar University. This panel was chaired by Shrimoy Chaudhary (Shiv Nadar University). Interdisciplinary approach in teaching helps the learning process to gain not just linear momentum, but fulfil multi – dimensional aspects of any subject. Giving equal importance to all subjects, without considerably weighing one over the other is an objective that needs to be achieved in education. The speaker for this panel, Gita Chadha from University of Mumbai, aimed to drive home this very point from the viewpoint of Sociology, through her presentation on the topic of “Crafting an Interdisciplinary Classroom : Teaching Across the Two Cultures”. Analogous to this is the view that educational reformists have when it comes to Drama. As Maya Rao presented her thesis on “Worlds in the Classroom”, one was able to visualise the scope for pedagogy in a fashion never thought of before. The chair, Shrimoy Chaudhary, of the Department of History at Shiv Nadar University agrees to this pedagogy and is of the opinion that teachers must analyse the thinking that lies behind the practice, and devise methods to keep the intellectual level of students engaged. The two days’ conference ended with a panel discussion called “The Future of Undergraduate Education in India” with Amber Habib (Shiv Nadar University) as the moderator. The first speaker of this panel Sudipta De (Jadavpur University) claimed that there are different categories of students and if we don't deal with each group in accordance with their pedagogy, it will become very difficult to implement them. Tulika Chandra (Shiv Nadar University) continued the conversation on assessment in her presentation by drawing attention to two issues: The frame of question papers at undergraduate level and the evaluation system adopted in the Indian education system. The discussion that followed this looked into the assessment techniques that should be used in an attempt to enable a critical pedagogy. The discussion along with the conference ends with the question of whether digitization can replace the need of teachers.

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Project E-QUAL Newsletter - Volume II, Issue II

Project E-QUAL Newsletter - Volume II, Issue II

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