An endeavour to empower students

Updated on: Monday, December 07, 2009

Can a student in an engineering college choose his teachers? Can he choose the subjects of study in a particular semester? Can he choose his own timings of theory and laboratory classes? Yes.

All these choices are possible under the unique Fully Flexible Credit System (FFCS) introduced by the VIT University for its B.Tech., M.Tech., M.S. Software Engineering and M.B.A. programmes from 2008-09.

The universities in India are following an old system of higher education introduced by the British, which is called a cohort system in the U.S. and a rigid system in India. The old and stereotyped system — which of course is the current system in all universities in India —provides for a fixed timetable specifying the number of periods each day and the number of periods for each subject in a week.

Under this system, the students have to study only under the teachers fixed by the management. Present-day students like to make decisions on their own and like to plan their future by themselves.

Employers expect students to have multi-disciplinary competency, leadership skills and be ICT (Information and Communication Technology)-ready. But student aspirations and demands of the work place have become highly diverse.

The present rigid, fixed-credit system of learning offers very little flexibility to students in choosing the subjects of their choice and helps them little in becoming a well-rounded person.

“We want to compete with universities in the rest of the world. The FFCS is an endeavour at addressing these problems and introducing a student-friendly higher education system which gives the students the added advantage of migrating to various universities in the West which follow a similar system in the midst of their programme, through transfer of credits, ” says G. Viswanathan, Chancellor of VIT University, explaining the rationale behind the introduction of the new system.

Sekar Viswanathan, Pro-Chancellor and the architect of FFCS at VIT says that the system offers flexible timings for students starting from 8 a.m. until 7.30 p.m. Each student is given a random number and the students are expected to register online under the FFCS. They can choose their lecturers or professors from among a given list of teachers for each subject on a `first-come, first-served' basis.

If a particular teacher has been chosen by the specified maximum number of students already, the student who registers late will have to choose the `next-best' teacher, according to her order of preference. This system, besides giving the students the choice of teachers, puts pressure on the teachers to excel, so that the largest number of students choose them, said G.V. Selvam, Pro-Chancellor.

From the management point of view, this system has necessitated recruitment of more teachers and increasing the number of classrooms in order to meet the needs of the students, for, under this system, different teachers will be handling the same subjects in different classrooms simultaneously, as against the old system where the same subject teacher will be handling the entire class of 60 students in a given branch on a given day.

“We will be requiring 25 per cent additional teachers and 20 per cent additional classrooms, and steps are being taken to meet the additional requirements,” said Mr. Viswanathan.

D. Subhakar, Director-Academics, who is responsible for implementing the FFCS points to another flexibility in the system. If a student feels that the number of subjects chosen by her was too high, imposing a heavy workload, or if the student feels that she would be able to study one more subject in a semester, she has the choice of dropping or adding a subject within one week of the commencement of classes for a particular semester.

The system also offers a unique advantage for the bright students of the B.Tech. programme who are able to finish their subjects for the entire programme within three years (as against the four years prescribed for the programme), in that they can study extra subjects during the remaining two semesters.

The successful completion of the programme would entitle them to the award of a B.Tech. honours degree. Yet another innovative feature is that if a student of a particular branch, for example B.Tech. mechanical engineering, is ambitious enough to also study a subject in Information Technology or Electronics and Communication Engineering in order to enhance his skills and employability, he will be given a `Minor' title in that subject in addition to his basic B.Tech. degree, provided he earned 15 extra credits.

The flexibility given to the engineering student to study subjects in science, humanities and management will enable her to acquire a multi-talented personality, which is required in the current globally competitive environment, he said.

An endeavour to empower students

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