My views as a panelist on the Essence, Relevance, Challenges and Effectiveness of Interdisciplinary courses/Research
Oct 22 | 1500-1630 | Industry Institute Conclave-2021 at NIT Raipur
Why Interdisciplinary courses are so Important for any institute?
The fact that there are several departments inside an institute clearly indicates that there is some homogeneity amongst them at some level.
While on the surface Electrical Engineering might be different from Mechanical or Civil Engineering but they might have some commonality in terms of ways of addressing an engineering problem or trying to solve a problem. May be they look at the problem, pick their arrows from their repositories of knowledge, use a mix of arrows, aim them and deliver the arrow with the right amount of deftness to attack the problem. If you fail, you return back to the repository and try to pick up a more optimal set of arrows and go about attacking the problem – each time the pick of arrows becomes better because you have the outcome of your previous set of arrows and you know what all arrows are in you repository and this is a process.
One could, may be, say that this process is applicable to other non-Engineering fields. It is true.
So if you look at, from the outside, what is important is what is their in your repository that you can use. A multi-disciplinary option gives you a great variety of arrows as against single discipline courses. In a way institutes are in a unique position to help kids build a variety of arrows in their repository. Instead of each kid picking up arrows from a limited set (very often, every kid has the same set of arrows) what if they were allowed to pick arrows from anywhere and fill their repository? That way institutes would have produced kids each having a different variety of arrows which means they are more unique!
What is in for institutes in this?
Well they know what arrows work what does not and additionally they know what combination works and what does not. This gives them a chance to equip the kids with better arrows but also might be able to generate new arrows by mutations. I don't need to remind in this pandemic how lethal mutations can be! I think if the objective on a institute is to equip the country with kids who are equipped diversely so that they can go and solve problems, then interdisciplinary courses are mandatory.
Is interdisciplinary education at all going to improve the industry outcomes?
If we equate the industry as a force that is at the forefront of solving problems, then the people who are part of the industry need to be equipped with a knowledge repository that is wide in (a) variety (multi-disciplinary) and (b) also importantly there should be a wider variety of people; people whose repositories are different from each other.
This variety^2; variety in a repository and variety of repositories gives the industry a better armor to address problems.
Today most industries are equipped to solve problems that are either known or are a little variant from known problems. But the recent pandemic has though us that we should be equipped to address new problems.
Especially the problems that we do not know are problems yet!
What Challenges will be faced by an Educational Institution during the implementation of Interdisciplinary courses?
Plenty of challenges!
But institutes are known to be able to overcome them organically.
First and the foremost would be to design a large number of inter-disciplinary courses in the true sense of variety; this going to be a challenge because you need to build from ground zero.
But I think given the current scenario in most institutes kids are restricted with blinds to study from a set of courses – this needs to go first for any statistically significant inter-disciplinary courses to make way!
The second challenge is in getting the faculty from different disciplines to collaborate – while this might not be true in some forward looking colleges, very often I have found members of one discipline not having the same degree of enthusiasm for another discipline.
This needs to go. I think if these challenges are addressed this will be a great start.
At what level of education, interdisciplinary education can be pursued?
If you look at the current education system, in India, if not around the globe you will see that until about 15 years of age there are no choices – whether you like it or not you have to study general and social sciences, mathematics.
Between 15-17 years you get a chance to choose something of your choice, which unfortunately is not a real choice in India because the marks and the societal perceptions determine the specialization you get attached to. And this goes into the choice when you are 18 years to do a 3 to 5 year course.
What is the best time?
When the child is too young, since the interests are not expressed or known the choice is often made by the parent and when the kid is old enough to know what she wants to do she does not have any space to move. The jig-saw puzzle is solved!
I think it might be good to have a multi-disciplinary options when the kids are 15-17 years of age.
May be have an option to choose any subject, say mathematics, history and economics; why should all of them study the same Mathematics/Biology, Physics, Chemistry or Arts or Economics and Commerce.
I think this two years could allow one to figure out what they like. Allowing them to choose from a larger option during their 3/5 year course. Ofcouse we should have more multi-disciplinary options in 3/5 year courses.
This is one option which I think will require a lot of infrastructural changes – you can not have a PQR Arts college or RST Science College which means all academic institutes should be able to teach a multitude of subjects. Which ofcouse is not easy. But then who said things are easy!
If we need things to happen we need to put an effort. I believe early introduction of multi-disciplinary courses might make learning more enjoyable and less stressful (when you see children outside an exam hall catching up their notes just before they enter the exam hall you know what I mean).
Another radical view might be, say in case of an Engineering college, to give all the students a degree in Engineering without any specific specialization. Once they come into the college they can take any course of their liking in any department enabling a student to graduate with subjects which might include Solid Mechanics, Signal Processing, Computer Architecture, Biomedical … it could be a harsh mix of different subjects. They may not seem aligned but then there might be solution to problems in these chaos of subjects.
May be this concatenation of subjects might germinate ideas that can solve a problem that we do not yet know exists!
How Interdisciplinary education/research can solve the Challenges of Industry-Institute Collaboration?
I am not very sure of the challenges.
Sometime I feel this discord is more to indulge in a discussion between the institute and industry ;-)
If you look from the perspective of students transitioning into industry … Industry always wants a super kid which they know our education system can not produce!
But I think from an industry perspective, a multi-disciplinary institute is a great place to seek solutions because there are experts from multiple disciplines under one roof.
But the problem is most institutes different specializations work in a very islandish manner.
They seldom seem to have the time to interact and do some work jointly; for example we do not find many workshops or conferences say hosted by Electrical and Civil Engineering together.
So the best way forward is for the departments in the institute be more collaborative. May be one can start off with joint student projects, joint seminars, workshops, what ever. Once this is demonstrated the collaboration with industry will be much simpler.
Mind you, today we are so in our own that the same technique or algorithm is known by a different name! As an example, edit distance is popular in the Computer Science stream while dynamic time warping is what Electronics and communication stream calls it. Things like this should disappear.
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