All set to scale collaborative heights
Abdul Latheef Naha
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About the Indo-U.S. Interuniversity Network for Higher Education and Research launched by President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam early this month.
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EXPLORING NEW FRONTIERS: The Amrita Viswa Vidyapeetham, in Coimbatore. Photo: K. Ananthan
The faculty of 20 leading American universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Purdue and Yale, will soon be teaching in India. Our university students will get some of the best lectures in the world, thanks to a recent agreement signed between a few top institutions from India and the U.S.
The Indo-U.S. collaboration in higher education got an unprecedented boost when President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam launched a historic Indo-U.S. Interuniversity Network for Higher Education and Research early this month.
E-learning network
Accordingly, 20 American universities have joined Amrita Viswa Vidyapeetham (Amrita University), Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST) to enhance higher education and research in India through a satellite e-learning network.
Amrita University — consisting of Amrita School of Engineering (ASE), Amrita School of Business (ASB) in Coimbatore, and Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences (AIMS), Amrita School of Applied Arts and Sciences ( ASAAS) in Kochi — is the focal point for the Indo-U.S. collaboration in the country.
The institutions in the U.S. university consortium that signed the collaboration are Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, University of Washington, University of Texas at Austin, State University of New York at Buffalo, Cornell University, Purdue University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of North Dakota, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of California Berkeley, University of California Los Angeles, University of California San Diego and University of California Santa Cruz.
Some of these universities are ranked among the best in the world. They have entered into a three-year collaboration with Amrita and the Indian Government. Three international corporations — Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Cadence Design Systems — are also involved in the collaboration. These companies will fund the U.S. participation in the programme. They will pay the salaries and travel expenses of American professors.
The programme
The U.S. universities will send their best faculty to India to teach and guide students from hundreds of colleges and universities, using Amrita's e-learning system and ISRO's exclusive education satellite called Edusat. Amrita Viswa Vidyapeetham, a deemed-to-be-university, will coordinate the delivery of all the courses by the visiting professors.
The programme will focus on areas such as engineering and computer science, information and communication technologies, materials science, biotechnology and bioinformatics, nanotechnology, medical sciences and management sciences.
The programme will expose U.S. faculty to potential research partnerships in India, and would also promote more Indian students to gain admission into U.S. engineering schools. Classes taught by participating faculty will be delivered to hundreds of colleges and universities throughout India over Edusat. In the future, the teaching materials of participating faculty and researchers will be included in a digital library to be created by Amrita University.
According to Venkat Rangan, Vice-Chancellor of Amrita University, the American universities in this consortium are first-tier engineering schools that can help offset the imbalance in the quality of professors in India's fastest growing colleges and universities.
Prof. Rangan, who was a former computer science professor at the University of California, San Diego, says that "these satellite courses will turn more students into top-level engineers, not just for India, but potentially for Ph.D. programmes and businesses in the U.S. as well."
The collaboration is in the interests of the U.S. as well. U.S. universities expect some of the best students from India to come to the U.S. for postgraduate education, giving U.S. technology leaders such as Microsoft and Qualcomm access to more world-class engineers.
For over 30 years, a large number of Indians have been teaching in American universities. The flood of graduates from IITs and other high-tech institutions has spread over several American universities.
An estimated 10,000 academics of Indian origin are teaching at these institutions. There is thus a great deal of synergy and familiarity in the system of higher education between India and U.S.
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Selected institutions
About 25 selected educational institutions are expected to participate in the programme initially. The Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC) will enable creation of e-learning contents, capture them in multimedia rich course material and archive them for continued use.
Apart from Amrita University, the other Indian institutes taking part in the programme include IITs of Mumbai, Chennai and Kanpur; Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi; Symbiosis International Education Centre, Pune; Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore; Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad; Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal; NITs of Surathkal, Silchar, Srinagar and Kurukshetra; Sardar Vallabhbai National Institute of Technology, Surat; Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, Bhopal; and JNTU College of Engineering, Anatapur.
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