Covid 19: PEC announces next semester to be online

Right from the beginning of this pandemic, Punjab Engineering College Chandigarh has been thinking ahead and figuring out the way forward during the pandemic time. More than a month ago, we had felt that opening the campus with all 3300 students would not be possible till November, and we must plan for an online semester. We had a virtual open house meeting with all faculty members where we sought their opinions on how we could conduct an online semester. Those suggestions were collated, discussed further with Heads of Departments from operational/administrative perspective and a final proposal was taken to Senate, which approved the same yesterday.

I am writing about it here so that other institutions who are yet to take a decision may benefit from our thought process. Of course, it must be kept in mind that each institution has its own context and its own constraints. And hence one cannot copy another institutions' formula and implement it as it is.

While a lot of faculty members feel that on-campus education is of higher quality, the problem was that there is no clarity on when we could start online classes. We could have postponed the semester by a few weeks if there was a reasonable assurance that we would be able to open the campus fully in due course. But if we have no assurance, and our own reading of the situation tells us that a fully open campus may not be possible till November (perhaps next year), there is really no point in waiting. We must start our semester at the usual time, which is last week of July, and it will have to be in online mode.

Modes of online courses:

We first defined how online courses could be conducted, and we figured that three models would be appropriate for us, besides a mixed model. They are:

1. Online – External: In this mode, the department announces an external course to be equivalent to a course in our curriculum. Students register for the course with the external agency/platform. These platforms include Swayam, Coursera, edX, Harappa, etc. Note that some platforms offer shorter courses, and therefore, the department may declare a set of 2-3 courses to be equivalent to a PEC course, and the student would have to register for those 2-3 courses. As an aside, UGC and AICTE are pushing for this model in Covid times. They encourage that 20 percent of all curriculum be covered through such courses where the external platform gives a certificate and the institution allows that course under its credit-transfer policy. There is also a possibility that they may increase this limit to 40 percent. We were earlier thinking of considering this mode with credit transfer (that is, the students will only get credit towards graduation requirement, but not any specific grade, and therefore will not count towards computation of CGPA). However, the final Senate decision requires that in courses conducted in this mode, the departments would still carry out an end-semester exam for all those who have received the passing certificate from the platform. And a letter grade will be assigned to the students based on that exam.
2. Flipped Classroom Model: Like the previous mode, the department will find one or more courses as equivalent to a PEC course. However, there is a local instructor, who expects the students to have gone through the material prescribed. And then the instructor will conduct a weekly tutorial or doubt clearing session. The instructor will also give assignments, quizzes, and other forms of evaluations, including mid-semester and end-semester exams. This is likely to emerge as the most common mode of delivering online education.
3. Online – Internal: In this mode, the instructor takes all lectures oneself and takes continuous evaluation throughout the semester. Instructor may use a combination of technologies to deliver online education. These could include recorded lectures or live streaming of lectures. In case of recorded lectures, there would be live sessions for doubt clearing. Lectures could be recorded using webcam of the PC, or could be a usual lecture but in an empty classroom, or a Powerpoint presentation with a voice over. In case of a lecture in the classroom, we can even ensure that there are a couple of token students in such classes given that half our students are from Chandigarh.
4. And finally, there can be mixed models, doing some topics through online – internal model, and other topics through a flipped classroom model.

Since our faculty members will be delivering the online education for the first time, we wanted to make sure that they have enough time to learn new techniques and conduct the course at the same time. And hence the course load needs to reduce. We will offer less courses this semester than what we usually offer, and in particular, expect most courses with small registration to be offered using Online - External model in which only exams will be conducted by PEC for grading purposes.

There will also be training of faculty members in online teaching and learning processes, both in terms of technologies to be used as well as the pedagogy to be used. Also, we will be procuring licenses of any software specifically needed and is not available free.

To minimize the number of courses to be offered, we are asking the departments to allow MTech electives to be offered as electives to BTech students as well. The incoming 4th year batch would not have the option of minor or specializations. Of course, they can use the period to do such courses from various online platforms and build strong credentials in whatever area they are passionate about.

We are also reducing the number of courses to be registered by 3rd semester and 5th semester students by one. We believe that students anyway have additional stress of online, and if we can reduce their load by one course which they can do in a future semester (our curriculum has very low load in the 4th year), that would help tremendously. Each department will decide which course can be postponed. This decision will be taken based on whether a course is per-requisite to many future courses, and whether the course is difficult to teach in an online fashion (many complex lab experiments, say).

We have several common courses across all MTech programs. They are in AI/ML, IoT, Maths, etc. These courses are offered by multiple instructors. They are short courses (fractional credits). We are asking the departments to coordinate and find appropriate online courses and offer them in Online-External mode, with one instructor responsible for final exam and grading.

We are also asking all the departments that for major and minor project courses as well as MTech projects, they should consider assigning projects which can have software component, designing, simulation, and other such components which can be more easily done while staying at home.

The labs are an issue in many courses. We are asking each department to look at the virtual labs site and see what all is available that can be used in our courses. Alternatively, there is a hope against hope that we will be allowed to bring in a couple of hundred students at a time to the campus during the semester. If that happens then students come to campus by rotation, and finish their labs in a small period of time. If nothing else works, we will go with just the live demonstrations of labs being video recorded and shared with students.

For the conduct of exams, the current hope is that we would be able to bring in all students to campus in November for on-campus exams. But we will need to conduct mid-semester exams and it is possible that we may have to conduct even final exams online. Also, we will need to conduct many quizzes and other evaluations online. So a committee has been formed to look into technology support for online exams. I may add that in a recent video conferencing session by Coursera CEO with several vice chancellors of India, they had mentioned that if we get into their "Coursera for Campus" program, it would be possible for an instructor to author exams and conduct it with online proctoring and plagiarism check, etc.

In any online education strategy, the most difficult aspect is to take care of students who do not have Internet access at home. We are working with multiple strategies to deal with this. First, if there are Internet cafes or Common Service Centers (CSC) nearby, students can go there to get access to online lectures. We will be making sure that all synchronous learning, exams, tutorials, etc., are as per a schedule announced by the Institute. This will enable the students to plan when to go to a place with Internet access. This, of course, would not satisfy everyone. Some students who belong to financially weak backgrounds and are getting fee waivers from the Institute can get an additional financial support to pay for Internet access (if payment was the only issue, and Internet access was otherwise available). Lastly, we will allow such students to come back to campus and stay in our hostels. We are hoping that 10% of our students can stay back in the hostels due to these reasons and the government guidelines would permit that. These students can use our computing resources as well as Internet access for their online lectures and other materials.

There is a plan to have a lot of online activities by all student clubs and technical societies. They should not feel that the online semester is only for studies. The extra curricular activities should be even more than what we normally have in a semester. And we have the experience. Our students ran a super-active calendar of online activities after we closed the campus in March.

The placement activities will be completely online. We really don't have a choice here as no company wants to travel at this time for campus recruitment, and it fits in very well with our plan for an online semester. Any training of students for placement activities will also be conducted online.

Mental health issues are becoming more serious when we have so much anxiety and uncertainty. To provide support for our students at home, we are looking at options for providers of counseling online and the system will be in place before the semester starts.

The MTech admissions are being done jointly with all NITs, and they are expected to join in the last week of August. The BTech admissions are being done through joint counseling with all NITs and IITs, and as per current schedule expected to join around 1st October. So we will have to plan something special for freshly admitted students in terms of joining online, etc.

There are many other parts of the overall plan, but the plan is also evolving, and we will keep relooking at all our decisions as we know more about the progress of the disease.

Indeed, one of the problems of planning in these uncertain times is that by the time you reach a consensus, the situation on the ground has changed. I remember that when we started planning for the next semester 5 weeks ago, the assumption we started with was that we can bring in about 10% of our students in hostel in August, 20% in September, 30% in October and 40% in November which is our normal state (about 60% students stay off campus). But in these five weeks, we are not so sure of bringing everyone back on campus in November, and indeed, my personal proposal today would be to plan for an entire year to be online for residential institutions.

We would be happy to receive any suggestions from any of you.