The report reaffirms what has been mentioned earlier in this blog regarding Indian education failing to promote design thinking in engineering and management schools.
The report comments on the academic stucture and acknowledges the fact that IITs have always enjoyed greater academic autonomy. What is puzzling is that the IITs could not exploit their academic autonomy in breaking free from the department silos to encourage cross-disciplinary interactions. The needs of twentieth century coupled with the industrial focus on mass production, perhaps, prompted them to overemphasize the role of specialists. Unfortunately, this ultimately resulted in unhealthy competition between departments which make it difficult now to encourage inter-disciplinary work. The needs of the 21st century are different. [Related blogposts: (i) A Necessary Condition, but is it Sufficient? (ii) Should we specialize?].
Here are some excerpts from the Kakodkar Committee Report [Source: Chapter-7 Innovation and Entrepreneurship] which highlights the need for a change to meet the challenges ahead.
(Quote)
The IITs have built their departments as silos. Little inter-department work is done and, in fact, when faculty from different departments start working together, they are often even discouraged. Inter-disciplinary programmes have therefore rarely come up and even if they do, they are finally one or the other department's baby. [Page 145]
The curriculum for B.Tech/M.Tech students follows the decades old traditional structure. It progresses from basics of the sciences, to basics of a particular discipline to advanced topics in that discipline. There is some flexibility to take electives, but these are often towards the end of the degree course and are carefully restricted to fit students into a predetermined mould. This well-structured curriculum does not allow a creative student the freedom to do courses across departments, take off for a semester and try participating in a start-up and come back, or take up some project work instead of a course. The curriculum is designed for a mass of ordinary students; it does not cater to exceptional students. The structure goes against the promotion of entrepreneurship and innovation. [page 146-147]
There are exploratory attempts to change this. For example, IIT Delhi has a course on design in the first year which gives students hands-on experience with designing and building useful products. The new IITs have the chance to quickly develop much more flexible curricula as they are not weighed down by decades of tradition and cumbersome processes. IIT Mandi is extending the IIT Delhi approach to give students hands-on design-oriented mini projects throughout their programme. This is patterned on the curriculum in Olin College, Boston, and the conceive-design-implement-operate (CDIO) approach being popularized by MIT. [Page 147]
(Unquote)
Related links:
Collaborating by Design
http://ksahu.blogspot.com/2010/03/school-of-design-iit-bhubaneswar.html
Design Thinking in the Upcoming IITs, IIMs, NITs
Bottomline:
64% feel that IITs must play a role in shaping technical education in the country [Page 186].
That being so, in my opinion, their biggest contribution will be to bring back the “Voice of the Faculty (in general)” which is presently lost in the academic hegemony of our education system that stifles creativity and innovation [There are good teachers outside the IITs and IIMs as well]. Click on the figure below to see whose autonomy has been always endangered.
