Priorities:Vasireddy Venkatadri Institute of Technology Student Priorities

Overview

University Innovation Fellows Spring 2017 Pitch Video

Strategy 1: Peer teaching sessions

This idea is all about creating a beautiful platform for the students to enlighten and bring out the innovative thinking ability in them, and at the same time to effectively express their idea. We believe that peer Teaching is the best way to make this happen. We already have peer teaching classes going on in our daily classroom schedule. But the activities are not being executed in the way they are to be done. This might be due to the fact that students have an unnerving feel as they think they were forced to participate in the activities which might seem boring to them. So, changing the way these activities happen inside a classroom that students might be interested in, can help them grab opportunity to work in a team and learn something that would improve their knowledge.

How PT can be interesting:

Instead of faculty, students from senior classes may be designated to lead the classes
Maximum strength of each peer teaching session must be limited to 20.
At initial stages, group discussion with 4–5 students each group may be experimented. This might help them to overcome their fear of public speaking at the initial stages.
To avoid monotony, different activities many planned from session to session.

Possible issues:

As seniors are assigned as mentors to freshmen, they might not mingle in the team.
Availability of senior students who can effectively lead the sessions might be a problem.
Students might not want to participate in a team all of a sudden.

Hope of solving these issues

Faculty members mentor seniors, helping them solve the issues with the freshmen. Seniors to be awarded credits for their commitment to peer teaching sessions. Feedback from the members of a team lead by that senior, may fetch him/her credits. This puts senior students in their path as they help peers to participate in the activities.

I&E ecosystem via PT

Student Collaboration

In these sessions, students meet their fellows more personally. They talk to each other, and we believe that this is the initial stage of innovative mindset, such ecosystem can be developed across the campus. This helps students to understand the resources on campus.

Grabbing every opportunity

Participating in a team activity develops thought process that helps a student to know what interests him/her. Thus, they come to know what all opportunities they have at the moment. With the help of their team lead or the assigned senior, they can connect to the right way to grab an opportunity.

Connecting to campus resources

By collaborating with seniors and thereby faculty, students will get to know resources that the college has to offer them. Knowing the availability of resources, students will think of using them for their own growth leading to innovation & entrepreneurship.

Strategy 6: Redesigning assignments in a student’s beneficiary way

Since every subject final exam allocates few marks to students for the assignments that they submit, we want to redesign the assignment pattern in a more productive way.

As of now, same assignment is being given to all the students of the section. This system has few flaws since it gives a chance to students to copy it from others’ and the difficulty/practical implementation of an assignment is 2 on a scale of 10. This ultimately contradicts the whole idea behind giving an assignment.

What are the obvious flaws because of this?

It is a waste of time, doesn’t make a student to think innovatively or in a problem-solving way and marks are being taken for granted.

How we want it to be?

Students are divided into random groups as the professor wishes and each group is given a separate set of assignment(Not necessarily a written assignment).
Time limit for assignment submission should just be enough(not more/less).

Strategy 7: Industrial awareness through alumni interactions

It is not possible to have industrial tours for all students and also students will not have a clear idea of the industrial environment/opportunity through just 1 or 2 tours. For a student to have a keen idea on what to learn during their UG so that they don’t feel pressurized with problems after they join their workplace and also to have an idea on what skills they need to work on to join their field of intrest, we decided to have more interactive sessions with alumni who are working. They can either be web sessions or we can have them come down to our college if they are free to give seminars that eliminates students’ doubts and confusion regarding their career

Strategy 8: Design Thinking Work Shops

The workshop inculcates the way an individual thinks about a problem. It has 5 stages like Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. In each stage the participants will go through different thinking patterns like digging deeper, analyzing, brainstorming, designing and prototyping etc. Students will be benefited a lot by this. We are planning to conduct the workshop once in every week for our college students. So, students will be having a vision of how to think and what to do regarding a problem.

Strategy 9: Clubs/Activities/Sessions focusing on Communication skills

As of now, students are not being trained in soft skills or communication skills unless they enter their 3rd year and register under placement cell in our campus.

Why it is important to concentrate on these skills?

Most of the students (almost 65%) who join the college do not have a strong foundation in basics of English and have no idea of communicating properly/ speaking impromptively.

Since we spend almost 10 hours on an average in college everyday, it is important that we inculcate these skills during college hours because

it not only helps us get placed but also attributes in leading a successful career.

So we want to allocate at least 2 hours a week to classes where students get to interact among themselves and develop their Vocabulary/communication skills.

This can be achieved by conducting different fun activities related to improving the skills named above and many more.