Development of a Teaching Learning Centre and On-going Faculty Development Programs - A Case Study

Faculty development is a core strategy in continuing efforts to transform engineering education at any institution. Collaborations can strengthen faculty development initiatives, since the home institution has significant knowledge about its faculty members and the on-going dialogue about teaching and learning, while another organization can contribute expertise and experience that the home institution may lack. In this paper, faculty members at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M), India, a fifty-year old Institute of National Importance with an international reputation, and the Institute for Engineering Education and Innovation (IEEI) and the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) at Texas A&M University, USA, describe their ongoing collaboration which started in 2009. One visible result of their collaboration has been the founding of a Teaching-Learning Centre (TLC) to establish sustainable activities for faculty development in IIT-M. The TLC, which emerged from faculty conversations about continuing efforts to improve teaching, will hopefully enhance efficiency of course delivery and raise interest and motivation levels of students in understanding engineering and science subjects. As another concrete result of the collaboration, 3 three-day Faculty Development Programs (FDPs) and a one-week faculty interaction program, the first of their kind at IIT-M, were conducted for IIT-M faculty members from December 2009 to December 2011, initially by a team of experts from the CTE, and later by a joint team of Texas A&M and IIT-M faculty members. After due familiarization with the novel ideas on course delivery, taught and discussed during these programs, some of the IIT-M faculty members have applied a framework using a course delivery cycle to their classes. It was observed that twenty percent of the FDP participants methodically incorporated these pedagogical aspects in their teaching practices. Experiences of the faculty members in terms of the three principal thrusts of the FDP: (i) constructing learning outcomes, (ii) adopting active and cooperative learning methods and (iii) implementing formative plus summative assessment strategies are analyzed to understand how they implemented these thrusts through pedagogical approaches appropriate to the IIT-M ethos, which is characterized by a large student population of diverse socio-economic-cultural backgrounds. Also, issues related to varying set of instructions to a diverse group of students are identified and possible solutions are discussed for further action to sustain the TLC activities for the benefit of the teaching-learning process in IITM.