One credit courses at JKLU

No academic institution can have faculty that can teach all types of courses well. There will be areas of strength and there will be areas of weaknesses. But we want our students to pick up knowledge from diverse fields. How do we manage this.

Different universities solve this problem in different ways. The simplest way is to ask a faculty who cannot do justice to the topic to still teach it anyway. It is alright to do this for basic set of courses. Most good faculty members can do a reasonable job if not an excellent job of teaching courses which are not in their area of research but in the same broad discipline.

 Since Covid, when we all got used to online teaching and learning, some universities are allowing students to earn credits from Swayam and other online portals. 

Another unique way in which this is achieved at JK Lakshmipat University is by encouraging student mobility. Students, particularly in Engineering, spend a semester or two at some IIT or other fine institution and do courses there.

And finally, another common method of exposing to different areas and disciplines is guest lectures. Universities invite people from industry to expose students about industry practices, for example.

We have been doing all this including a huge focus on our students studying in IITs, but we always believed that we should do better. Online learning is useful, particularly when the top faculty from around the world become accessible to our students (through Coursera, for example), but if we can do an in-person course, it has its own value. Getting someone to give a seminar or a guest lecture is good but it is difficult to go in reasonable depth in limited time. Student mobility is exciting, but only about 30 percent of our students take advantage of this, which will slowly increase to 50 percent.

Getting a visiting faculty to teach a full 40-lecture course is often a challenge. It is not easy for people to travel every week, and their organizations may not always allow this. We are focusing on faculty members from top institutions like IITs and IIMs or successful experts from industry or even self-employed.

At JKLU, we have the concept of a 1-credit course. A typical 4-credit course consists of 40 lectures, and at least 80 hours of extra work which may be pre-reading, projects, presentations, preparing for exams, etc. So the 1-credit course is about 10 lectures and 20 hours of extra work. This becomes viable for many professionals. We can do this over two weeks - Fridays and Saturdays each week. Each day about 2.5 hours of lectures and the person can assign some pre-reading and some small project. The person will need to take only 2 days off from their work, since Saturdays are anyway holidays in most places and that much most organizations would permit their employees in the interest of education. Alternately, we look at local Jaipur experts who can come in the evening for 5 consecutive days in a week.

This is even making our faculty more innovative. Some of them are volunteering to teach an extra 1-credit course in the area of their expertise. There are topics that someone is excited about but do not have the time and energy to prepare for a full 40-lecture course. They can still expose the students to their excitement by organizing a 1-credit course. (And while the most common use case of this flexibility in courses is a 1-credit course, we do allow 2-credit courses or 3-credit courses, depending on the interests of our students and the availability of the expert.)

Students get to learn about a new and exciting topic from a genuine expert. If they do four such 1-credit courses, they can drop a full 4-credit elective, and hence these courses are not additional burden on their time. Since these 1-credit courses finish within the semester, at the end-semester exam time, they will need to prepare for one less course, and that reduces their anxiety and stress.

To give an example of recent courses, we had a course on "Social Network Analysis" by Prof. Suman Banerjee of IIT Jammu over 4 days. We have an internal course on "Regulating AI" by Prof. Kshitiz Verma, perhaps one of the first such courses in India. We had 7 such courses in Design (open to all) during the Jaipur Design Week.

In the next semester, we are expanding the scope to include Open Electives, that is, say getting a famous historian to teach a course on some topic in history, or getting a good constitutional expert to teach a course on the Constitution of India, besides technical courses.

Any suggestions on how we can improve the education of our students are always welcome.