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Undergraduate Programmes of IITJ: Curriculum for a Global Engineer

Suril V. Shah

News and Views

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Preamble

Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur is committed to educational excellence through a strong student-focused educational experience and to provide quality education with the contemporary and highly professional curricula. In order to achieve this objective, IIT Jodhpur has undergone a thorough curriculum change in the year 2019 and has come up with a new curriculum. This article highlights philosophy ingrained in the new curriculum and some of its salient features. The societal challenges of the 21st century are profound and wide-ranging. Basic needs such as energy, food and water, housing, mobility, and health will become even more acute as the world population exceeds 9 billion. The demands for sustainable development will require redefined and innovative engineering talent and leadership. There has been an emergence of a connected, competitive, and entrepreneurial global economy, in which successful engineers increasingly need technical competency and professional skills that differ from what worked in the past. These reasons build up a clear case for disruptive revision of the undergraduate curriculum.

Today the creative function of engineering is expected to be viewed and understood in the broader context of the new patterns of knowledge creation across disciplines obliterating traditional boundaries between science, humanities and social sciences, arts and engineering. IIT Jodhpur has pursued a newer structure of programmes in addition to classical programmes to address these opportunities.

Objectives

The objective of the new curriculum is to define a novel instructional paradigm and content plan to address modern demands of professional education (as outlined above) based upon the philosophy of outcome-based education. The curriculum builds on four guiding principles of outcome-based academics, i.e.,

1. All students can learn and succeed but maybe not do so on the same day or in the same way.
2. Each success by a student breeds more success (success must open up the opportunity of more success).
3. Academic institutions create and nurture the conditions of success.
4. The academic system acknowledges and respects challenging initiatives without fear of failure.

Unique Fetures

Unique features of the undergraduate curriculum are highlighted as follows:

• The curriculum emphasized the fundamentals of basic and engineering sciences to enable learners to have a broader multi-disciplinary perspective for the specialisation being pursued. Departmental courses focus on fundamental scientific principles behind the technologies.
• Avenues are created for pursuing co-curricular and extra-curricular creative interests as an integral component of the curricular content by introducing non-graded courses on social connect, performing arts, and communication skills. As an outcome of these pursuits, a student is expected to improve their capacity to imagine and to build up enthusiasm to pursue unknown territories through purely creative ventures.
• Early design courses are introduced which focus more heavily on conceptual design methods and less on discipline-specific artefacts. These courses teach that design is open-ended, that there are numerous engineering challenges beyond domains of traditional disciplines, and that students could begin to think and work like engineers.
• Avenues are created for making students continuously engaged in these intellectual processes throughout the curriculum and at an increasingly sophisticated level through design credits. Such continual integrative experiences help students expand and deepen their “internal knowledge structure” of the discipline, which will aid their eventual retrieval and use.
• Opportunities and challenges continue to require engineers to literally invent the future by developing breakthrough technologies that solve global problems and enhance the quality of life. Entrepreneurship education has been introduced in the curriculum as a minor which gives them solid experience in product design and development, prototyping, technology trends, and market analysis.
• Options of Department Area Specialisation and five-year B.Tech.+M.Tech. allows students to pursue in-depth study of the topics of interest belonging to the programme. Department Area Specialization in Engineering Innovation has also been introduced with the aim of making students Industry Ready by offering a five-month Practical Project jointly with an Industry or an R&D organization. Students get real-world experience working for an industry or R&D organization on a project that complements their academic experience.
• With the rapid change in the contours of engineering education due to emergence of Miniaturization, Parallelism, Smart Materials, Bio-mimetic Systems, AI and Cognitive Systems, the role of engineering institute is not only preparing students in their major areas of study but also on other skills to encourage interdisciplinary teams to address challenges faced by the society. The emphasis has been laid on the development of technical skills in interdisciplinary areas and upcoming fields by introducing various Interdisciplinary specializations such as AI, CPS, IoT, Robotics, Smart Healthcare, etc.
• With evolving patterns of knowledge creation across disciplines and obliterating traditional boundaries between science and engineering, a capability linked Double B.Tech. with second degree in Engineering Science is introduced to pursue newer structures of programmes in addition to classical programmes to provide ability to apply diverse knowledge and skills flexibly in novel situations.
• With changing paradigms of Evaluation and Assessment, the performance of students in a course is evaluated not only thorough examinations but also on a continuous basis which include, but are not limited to, interaction in the classroom, quizzes, assignments, tutorials, laboratory work, term papers and projects. Technology-enabled aids have been assimilated into continuation evaluation as an integrated component.
• The finer granularity in grading has been introduced to allow for more precise and fairer grading, provide a more reliable indication of student performance, and give students a better opportunity to improve their grades.

Throughout the curriculum, efforts have been laid down at building up strong foundation, enabling continuous learning, inter-disciplinary breadth, and design thinking, and imbibing creative and critical thinking, social responsibility, professional ethics, and sustainability as distinct thematic commitment.

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