NEWSLETTER
OCTOBER 2011
Leadership - the way to life
The role of the Academic Leader is often a difficult one to describe. As a leader in higher education the dean has various responsibilities and many challenges to face that tend to evolve with the ever-changing face of higher education. The role is one that is multifaceted, challenging and often ambiguous. Leaders' duties have changed over time from being "almost exclusively student focused to include a multifaceted array of roles.... Higher education in India is gasping for breath, at a time when India is aiming to be an important player in the emerging knowledge economy. In such a situation leaders for the future should be the gatekeepers of standards, imagination, creativity and innovation. The maladies and deficiencies in India's higher education system need urgently to be addressed by making it more professional and creative. Understanding this requirement and building on the knowledge gathered during the journey Mission10X team along with various eminent leaders tried bridging this gap.
OCTOBER 2011
MISSION10X - ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP WORKSHOP
During the year 2009 various academic leaders/principals from all corners of India went through the initial model of understanding the role of a leader. After completing the first phase of its journey Mission10X progressed on a more directive path to build the educational ecosystem. A three level Academic Leadership workshop curriculum got created to help principals of engineering colleges in India attain the role of a global leader. This workshop got designed after a detailed need analysis and identifying a list of required competencies for the academic leaders. The vision of this workshop is Enabling academic leaders to look beyond efficient administration towards effective leadership and thereby influence the quality of education within their institutions.
In this program Level 1 and 3 are instructor led training while level 2 is e-learning format. As a residential programme it provides opportunities for interaction with peers and experts. In order to provide the best of contents to the institutional heads, the programme is prepared in collaboration with various international partners who help in developing the content based on global standards. Development Dimension International assists in the Level 1 of the programme while Harvard Business Publishers with whom Mission10X got into a formal understanding on 5th September, 2011 supports the web based 2nd level and the interactive 3rd level of the programme.
This programme is build with the objective of: 1. Equipping the leaders with leadership competencies through internationally benchmarked contents 2. Building a perspective on engineering education in collaboration with peers and experts 3. Developing a learning culture in the colleges by encouraging leaders to be role models 4. Providing an exposure to new technologies for learning 5. Facilitating implementation through action learning
The first Level 1 programme was launched in the month of March 2011 in Hyderabad. Since then various such programmes have been conducted at Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, Delhi and West Bengal, involving principals from the states of Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Tripura, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. Many of them have now advanced to L2 stages of this programme. L3 was formally launched on 5th September, 2011 which saw an attendance from principal attendees of the first workshop held in Hyderabad. This Programme plans to develop 250 academic leaders who can make substantial difference to
OCTOBER 2011
EMBRACING TECHNOLOGY FOR EDUCATION
Tamboli, Director Strategic Academic Engagement, Microsoft India graced the event.
Speaking on the occasion each delegate spoke about the importance of technology and e d u c a t i o n i n I n d i a . E m b ra c i n g n e w technological advancements creates new opportunities for advancements especially in the field of academia.
The webcast event, Together in Change on September 5th 2011, which brought together the gulf of teaching community in one platform saw m o re t h a n 4 0 0 i n st i t u t i o n s l o g g i n g o n simultaneously to the portal. On a single day the portal estimated an enormous surplus of 700 hits at a time. Such technological capability of the Mission10X portal ([Link]) proved its worth and the event turned out to be a big success.
Ms. Pratima Amonkar, Director, Academia for Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) at Microsoft India formally announced the migration of Mission10X portal in the Cloud Platform where as Dr. Anurag Srivatsava, Chief Technology Officer for Wipro's IT Business was the first member to log in to the Mission10X portal after the announcement.
Understanding and building from the opportunity created by the users of this community portal. Mission10X has now moved on to an easier platform with a strong infrastructure. Cloud computing enables the portal to be more Agile, give a Richer Experience to the user, help the portal to scale higher and be more reliable with the different front end applications. This migration enables the portal with the Next Generation Architecture capability
The Mission10X portal is amongst the first in the Engineering community to leverage Cloud technology. The family has already started to experience agile viewing and navigation of the website and is now able to have a better experience viewing photos and videos faster. The portal is high not only on performance but also on storage capacity and reliability and is well linked to social networks.
The migration of the Mission10X portal was formally announced on 22nd September, 2011. On this occasion Dr. Selvan D, Senior Vice President Talent Transformation, Dr. Anurag Srivatsava, Chief Technology Officer for Wipro's IT Business, Nagarjuna Sadineni, Head Mission10X and guests from Microsoft India, Ms. Pratima Amonkar, Director, Academia for Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) at Microsoft India and Vinay
This migration to the Cloud Platform, demonstrate the strong technological capability of our Mission10X family and will facilitate the community to move forward with renewed vigour to transform engineering education in India.
OCTOBER 2011
A case study on AVL Trees and Re d - B l a c k Tre e wa s submitted by Prof. Ashish Awasthi from SRM College, Lucknow. This case study has been selected as the best case study nationally for the month of September. Prof. Ashish Awasthi is an active faculty member of the leaner forums in his college premises and this particular case study along with others from his college and other colleges got submitted for the month of September selection. According to Prof. Awasthi learners found the AVL Tree topic difficult and were unable to apply and understand concepts clearly. He gave a task to the learners to make a role play to define the AVL tree involving the maximum students of class. The role of the other group of participants was to give the values to the nodes to increase the complexity for better understanding.
While creating this Role play for the topic many challenges were faced by Prof. Awasthi Session plan took more time and effort for preparation and Time Management was a challenge as the activity was dynamic in nature. Learners were still understanding the new mode of teaching were they had to take active participation and they are not habitual of doing such activity because role play was a new activity for them. The leaner's reacted positively to this methodology and found AVL tree learning very interesting and easy. They participated actively and this method helped them to improve their analytical skills, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, visual and linguistic skills. It was also a paradigm shifted for both the faculty and the learner. The new modes of teaching helped the students get a better grasp the concept of AVL tree while they found learning in the class very interesting and were happy to have a lively classroom environment as they had fun with study. The activity proved to be very effective for the leaners.