Engaging Educational Issues in India

Ed Council Meeting

John White (and Mathai Joseph)

Outline

• Challenges in computing education in India

• Options for engaging

• Moving forward

Computing Education in India

• The challenge

– Over 1 Million students enter computing and engineering college and university programs each year

– Over 400,000 students graduate in computing-related programs each year

– Only 10% of these graduates are qualified to enter the Indian IT workforce

– Industry (and academia) are increasingly concerned with the quality of computing education

• Industry is concerned with the high cost of training computing graduates

• Industry is looking to more lateral hires to mitigate training costs

• Academia wants to see more students fully capable of entering the IT workforce

• Academia wants to see more students capable of, and interested in, graduate programs in computing

– Faculty• Most are not trained in computer science

• Most have little experience with, or knowledge about, teaching computing and computer science

Computing Education in India

• The constraints

– Computing curricula• Largely based on the ACM/IEEE-CS guidelines

• Difficult to change

– Need to raise the quality of computing graduates and computing faculty … at the same time!

Options for Engaging

• Two options discussed in Hyderabad

– Complementing existing undergraduate programs to build fundamental computer science knowledge

– Masters-level program for teaching computer science

• Complementing existing undergraduate programs

– Develop a series of additional courses that complement existing curriculum

– The courses• Focus on fundamentals of computer science that are not being taught

• Start with CS-1

– The model for a course• Online materials for students

• Online materials for teachers

• In-course testing

• Final assessment

Options for Engaging

• Complementing existing undergraduate programs (cont.)

– The model for the program• 10 – 15 courses to cover all aspects of fundamental computer science

• Teacher training to see faculty begin to own the courses and to eventually push for curriculum changes and the emergence of stronger under graduate programs in computer science that they own

• Possibly a final (ACM) certification if all courses passed

– Challenges in building and scaling a program• Developing the set of core complementary courses needed

• Developing the materials

• Engaging with partners in India to deliver this program in terms of: online materials, online tutoring, and testing

Options for Engaging

• Masters-level program for teaching computer science

– A graduate program for current and future computing faculty

– Focus• Increasing and improving computer science knowledge

• Improving pedagogical capabilities for teaching computer science

– Building such a program• US-India agency

• ACM (Ed Board, SIGCSE, ACM India)

• Others

Moving Forward

• Possible workshop to explore which options could be developed into a significant computing education initiative for India

– Involve:• ACM Ed Board and possibly Ed Council

• ACM SIGCSE computer science teachers

• ACM India Education Committee– Mathai Joseph, TCS– Prithwis Mukerjee, Vinod Gupta School of Management, IIT, Kharagpur– Madhavan Mukund, Chennai Mathematical Institute– Partha Chakrabarti, IIT Kharagpur

• Indian computer science faculty– IITs– Colleges and universities

– Possible steps• Form a Steering Committee involving a key contact from each group above

• Charge the Steering Committee with developing plans for a workshop

– Consider this an initiative of the ACM Ed Board and ACM India