Publicly Funded Higher Education Institutions should put up Detailed Course contents on the Internet

Last updated on 8th April 2014

Given below is an email that I plan to send shortly to top persons associated with Indian academic/higher education funding, oversight and administration. [Update: Mail sent on 7th April 2014.]

Dear sir/madam,

In the computer science/information technology (CS/IT) academic field some US universities have done an outstanding public service by making available freely on the Internet the following for their courses:

• Course structure
• Course book(s) - if the course is based primarily on it/them
• Reference books and other resources, if any
• Teaching material (could be prepared by the faculty or be a re-use of external publicly available material with clear attribution or as an external link)
• Assignments

Here is an example of such detailed course content: Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment - http://www.cs.stevens.edu/~jschauma/810/

As a teacher of over ten different computer programming (lab.) courses (as honorary staff/honorary faculty/visiting faculty) in a deemed university in Andhra Pradesh, India from 2003 to 2011, I found such course content to be very useful and was inspired by such examples and tried to, whenever I could, do the same for my courses on the university Intranet. [Now I am in the process of putting up the course material of most of these courses on the Internet here: http://raviiyerteaches.wordpress.com/, just in case it may be of use to others on the Internet.]

It seems to me that most CS/IT departments of Indian higher educational institutions generally do not follow such a practice. Some have course content pages (e.g. some of the IITs) but the information contained is minimal and does not come close to what I have mentioned above about some US university course pages. Yes, we have NPTEL, http://nptel.ac.in/, but that is a single national level portal which may find it difficult to accommodate various types of teaching methodologies and levels of rigour across the huge variety of educational institutions in the country.

Given this situation, I have a suggestion that publicly funded higher educational institutions in India should strongly encourage the faculty of these institutions in CS/IT departments and other departments as well to put up their course material in detail on their institution website so that it becomes available to any interested person in India (and abroad) over the Internet. I think it will be a wonderful return to the public on public money investment in publicly funded higher educational institutions of India. University assessment organizations like NAAC and NBA as well as prospective students (and their parents) can then look up these course pages to get some idea of the methodology and rigour used by the faculty to teach these courses.

As of now, it is extremely difficult for outsiders including prospective students (and parents) as well as, I presume, university assessment organizations like NAAC and NBA to get a decent feel of teaching standards in most Indian higher education institutions. This sort of transparency and accountability for teaching duties of faculty especially in publicly funded higher educational institutions of India may do wonders for improving the teaching standards of higher education in India.

Regards

Ravi S. Iyer
Software Consultant
---rest of email signature snipped---
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Mail update (below) sent on 8th April 2014]
A couple of clarifications:

1. By publicly funded higher education institutions I mean government (tax payer) funded higher education institutions.
2. The last sentence of the main body of the previous mail would be better expressed as follows: The above mentioned suggestion (faculty putting up detailed course material on the Internet) may result in the sort of transparency and accountability for teaching duties of faculty especially in publicly funded higher educational institutions of India that may do wonders for improving the teaching standards of higher education in India.