Experiment 2: Using Web Tools for conducting Seminar on Project

Background

Seminar on Project or simply Seminar is an integral part of VIII semester engineering course of VTU. The idea behind this academic activity is to encourage student to come up with an interesting topic connected to academics and make a presentation to the entire class. The entire process of seminar is expected to help student on how to choose a topic; research references to prepare the content for presentation and finally help him get rid of "stage freight" by making presentation to the class.Choosing a topic is one of the most defining moments of seminar process. It is so because there are too many topics to choose from. Additionally for a faculty to see that there is no overlap or duplication of topics is a daunting task. Just imagine class strength of 120 and the process of checking for duplication and even after choosing a topic each student has to come out with an "abstract" of his seminar topic to be approved by the concerned faculty. A seminar abstract to be approved must indicate two or more references consulted during the preparation of the abstract. Until now students were asked to submit the seminar abstract on paper and it was very difficult for a faculty to check all reference.

Our Experiment: For the year 2007-08 we adopted a web-based approach to conduct the entire process of seminar. We asked students to submit seminar abstract along with references via email. We insisted that references must be URL's so that we can verify them at once. Submitted abstracts were read in email form only and references were checked by clicking through them. Duplicate Seminar topics were detected using "search within mail" feature thus reducing the drudgery usually associated with paper based abstract submission. Once the seminar abstracts were accepted students were asked to prepare up to 15 slides using freely available online presentation tool and submit. Faculty went through the presentation and made suggestion if any and asked students to make the final presentation in the class. Thus paper work was eliminated to 100%.

Outcomes: While our approach simplified our work, it also gave our students to learn using email as means of submitting academic work and also learning using presentation software. The database of all such seminar is maintained is the next batch students are using it as reference. see here for detailed student response

EXPERIEMENT No 1: Using email to send questions to students and receive their answers.

In 2000 we were having a laboratory course titled Basic Skills Lab(BSL), under VTU. The objective of the course was to introduce to and familiarize students with basic and general purpose tools such as word processor-editing, mail merge , spreadsheet, HTML- designing home pages, linking other pages to given page, email- sending and receiving message etc. This was ideal situation for faculty to use email as an instructional medium and also testing means. Faculty used to send some questions to each student separately and students were expected to send their answers by the time they come to lab next week. Remember this was a time when email was not popular among students and our approach provided an excellent exposure to a tool that they might need all through their professional and personal life.