Outreach and Community Engagement Activities to Complement Engineering Program Outcomes in Indian Context

Abstract

Under Graduate Curriculum for engineering programs in India has been designed to emphasise deeper engagement of students with technical academic rigor to become strong at basic engineering principles, problem analysis, problem solving and develop engineering solution to a given well defined context of engineering. With the rapid change in the technical advancement front, the engineering needs of the people also have changed drastically and the existing model of imparting engineering education is becoming obsolete gradually. The accreditation agencies have come up with the set of attributes that are expected from engineering graduates to be professionally qualified to work on engineering problems. Engineering academic institutions in India started to make changes in their curriculum to fulfil the quality benchmarks of accreditations. The objective is to justify the attainment of all program outcomes specified within the four years of engineering under graduate program. This becomes a challenge when only pure academic courses are included in the curriculum. The graduates come out with the lower level skills like remembering and understanding but not the higher order skills like analysing, evaluating and creating engineering prototypes and products. A typical engineering curriculum in India allows students to experience limited creativity in terms of doing projects which are directly associated with contemporary engineering issues. Due to the nature of uncertainty and ill structured problems anticipated in future, academicians are encouraged to design curriculum by incorporating more generic content for learning and enable them to apply for specific context. All these are still carried out with well pre-formulated problems. There is a need to have students exposed to the live problems and contexts. This is only possible by including outreach and community engagement activities in design, delivery and assessment of engineering courses. These activities complement learning of technical aspects and lead to better attainment of program outcomes. This paper brings out the impact of outreach activities as a work in progress initiatives at Hyderabad Institute of Technology and Management(HITAM), an engineering college based in Hyderabad, India.