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 "Engineering Education for a Better World" Transforming Engineering Education Globally.
The Need
The world needs good engineering talent to find solutions to global challenges facing humanity such as energy, environment, health and socio-economic well being. However, rapid expansion of engineering educational institutions in India in recent years (from ~ 50,000 engineering seats per year in 1990 to > 600,000 today ) has created serious problems of maintaining quality engineering education and research to sustain and fuel economic growth in India itself.
The Response
IUCEE was conceptualized by over 150 leaders of engineering education and businesses from US and India in 2007. US and other countries will benefit from the higher quality talent available globally from improved capacity of Indian engineering research and education.
IUCEE Mentors
Process is under way already, over the last 2 year, with more than $ 1,600,000 (Rs. 8,00,00,000) private funding. Two philanthropic families both of Indian origin, one from US and the other from India, helped launch the program successfully.
Follow up
Extensive follow up within colleges and regions as well as documented outcomes assessment is being continuously emphasized as measures of success. 15 IUCEE Regional Centers have been set up all over India to coordinate the follow up. During 2008-2009, Indian faculty articipants from 2008 FLI, conducted roughly 100 regional workshops directly impacting more than 3000 other faculty and 30,000 students. Significant positive outcomes have been demonstrated with over 200 colleges all over India.
Partnerships with Government of India (GOI)
Partnerships have been built with various government agencies which are already engaged in similar efforts in order to leverage available resources and expertise, such as
- the NPTEL programs of IITs and
- the Faculty Development Scheme of MHRD through NITs
Current status
- Due to efforts of well wishers like Prof. Ashok Kolaskar, Desh Deshpande and Arjun Malhotra, FLI 2010 has getting into a sustainable state
- Colleges including several NITs have come forward to take care of part expenses of the program. FLI 2010 would offer 24 workshops in 22 locations across the country. More colleges are showing interest in joining the consortium
- The second pillar of the IUCEE system architecture has come together. We have more than 250 research professors from some of the best universities in US have agreed to help by becoming co-guides for those faculty applicants who get financial support and are registered with top tier universities in India, (NITs or IITs) with a guide from these institutions
- The Innovation/ Entrepreneurship pillar has also received support from a few companies
- Over 1200 faculty from 200 odd colleges have been benefitted directly by interaction with visiting experts and 8000 other faculty from more colleges in tier 2 and 3 towns have received inputs from IUCEE
- The IUCEE portal has been re-launched and provides a rich infrastructure to do match making, monitoring of progress by college, regional centre, state and national level. Over 300 faculty from the 1200 have shown great leadership in bringing about changes in their own spheres
Appeal to IIT Alumni to support IUCEE - a thought leadership initiative of PAN IIT alumnus
The Indo US collaboration was started due to a thought leadership idea born in the minds of several PAN IIT alumni which later took shape through the efforts of ASEE, IFEES and several other well meaning persons of the PAN IIT fraternity and has been contributing to the main theme of nation building under the PAN IIT association.
IUCEE has focused on bringing the best practices of the world's most advanced democracy(US) to the world's largest democracy that is India to help improve the yield and quality of engineers churned out of the over 2000 engineering colleges and thus pave the way for a strong economic growth of Indian economy and help it take advantage of the demographic advantage in India's favor. India has a tremendous opportunity to take on the grand challenges in engineering identified by the NAE of US and give affordable scalable engineering solutions to the world at large in collaboration with US engineering system.
It has four pillars starting with Faculty Development program and then help in upgrading their teaching and research skills and obtain higher qualifications recognized by large part of the world (accredited per world standards) and create the competency for innovation and entrepreneurship in abundance.
The results we have seen on the ground over the last two years is very impressive. This was possible because of the support of Dr. Desh Deshpande, and N R Narayana Murthy and their family as also support of Infosys both in terms of facilities and hospitality apart from management inputs. Likewise several other industry partners have contributed through knowledge inputs to the program.
Before coming to you with this appeal for contributing to this important initiative we have been working with senior officials in MHRD and DST. They have agreed to support the same with matching grants to the amount raised by us through private participation. We have had good response from some of the chambers of commerce and industry as also self financed colleges. It has now become necessary to come to you for financial help to sustain the initiative for the next five years or so to help the absorption of the best practices that is being brought to table covering all engineering disciplines and help produce engineers and not just engineering degree holders!
Kindly contribute liberally (a minimum of INR 5000 or equivalent in any convertible international currency) to make Indian engineering education so good that we can compete with best in the world in large numbers and help retain most of the FE outflow that is happening currently by creating opportunities in India that can be used to further improve the conditions in the educational institutions.
Kindly send your contributions to Pan IIT association account details of which are available in the portal indicating that it is for IUCEE. Kindly send details such remittance as mail to Krishna_vedula@ums.edu and muthya47@gmail.com for tracking purposes.
For more information on the IUCEE background, click here
Please visit the IUCEE program website
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Comments (1)
Dear Ashok, YOu may want to feed all the information you know about these projects as and when you receive to the webmaster. raj