Saturday, December 17, 2011

A Meta-university Takes Shape


Shaswati Das reports in today's Hindustan Times:

Cross-university education will no more remain a dream for students in Delhi. Pursuing two courses simultaneously at Delhi University (DU) and Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) or graduate students of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) trying their hands at technical courses offered at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) may soon become a reality.

To make this possible, four city-based institutes — DU, JMI, IIT and JNU — will join hands to tap their best faculties and make cross-discipline education available to students.

These are just early plans; as learn a little later, "Meanwhile, the institutes are awaiting further clarity on the matter to decide the future course of action."

Still, a fascinating development.

7 Comments:

  1. Vikram said...

    This is an interesting initiative. I can definitely see benefits for students in technical universities like IIT Delhi and DTU in being able to communications and business courses. The colleges should also share their events/seminars (if they dont already).

    One question though, why would a non engineering student want to take engineering courses (apart from basic computer programming perhaps) ?

  2. Vijay said...

    Dear Abi
    This is a great initiative in Delhi. Bangalore should have led by example here. Now, with the wonderful new undergraduate programme at IISc, it seems natural for faculty and students at RRI, JNCASR, IISc, NIAS, Ramaiah, Shristi and TIFR-CAM, TIFR-ICTS and NCBS to work seamlessly together. Not to mention with other places across town. There is so much synergy possible. Yet this is not happening. The interaction will work if IISc takes the lead. I know that at least one very serious attempt by others which has failed, because of IISc being tepid! Its still not too late.
    Cheers
    Vijay

  3. L said...

    The IITM had an MA in economics, but could not sustain it due to shortage of faculty. Such arrangements could have made it work, though I think they did try to import profs from other institutions for some courses. Vikram has a point though--I can just imagine an MA psychology student taking up fluid mechanics 101!

  4. chitta said...

    May be not fluid mechanics but there are other courses taught in engineering schools of general interest and with overlaps with non-engineering fields. For example: (i) Sustainability engineering (ii) Green building techniques (iii) Artificial Intelligence (iv) Cognitive Science (iv) Statistical Machine Learning (v) Systems Biology

  5. His Biscuits said...

    The level and sophistication of control theory and signal processing is pretty high in psychology these days. Here is a sample paper:

    http://mind.ucsd.edu/papers/emulation/emulation.html

  6. Ankur Kulkarni said...

    Gives engineering boys have more options for girls! This will be paradise! :-)

  7. Pratyush Tiwary said...

    Finally some sense, somewhere. A society in which such a change is a moot point, is a society that definitely needs this change.