BEST PRACTICE-1

Comprehensive Care System (CCS)

Objective:

Our objective as a Higher Education Institution is to transform young adults into dependable human beings. The procedures and activities we have designed to achieve this goal, have evolved into a system, the Comprehensive Care System (CCS). Its specific objectives are

• Creating an enriching learning environment embedded with spiritual inspiration for imbibing universal human values, ensuring that confusion, grievance and stress are resolved early on.
• Providing an engaged joyful life by providing platforms and opportunities to exercise inborn and acquired talents targeting cultural harmony and leadership quality.
• Providing training and guidance for future employability / entrepreneurship.

Context:

This best practice flows directly from ADBU Vision: moulding “intellectually competent”, “morally upright”, “socially committed” and “spiritually inspired” persons at the “service of India and the world” of today and tomorrow, so that every graduate manifests the desired attributes.

• Intellectual competence results from designing and teaching an up-to-date curriculum required by today’s industry.
• Moral Uprightness arises from personal conviction and acceptance of moral values taught and inculcated into our graduates.
• Social commitment programs are organised to make our students aware that they are among the privileged 5% population of our country and they have a responsibility towards the remaining 95%.
• Spiritual Inspiration is instilled by making them reflect on the meaning and goal of life and the role of the Divine in their life’s journey.

These attributes make our graduates dependable and competent human beings enabling them to make a positive difference to the society as young adults and ever after.

CCS is implemented as follows

A. Personality Development through moral values and spiritual inspiration:

• Daily Morning assembly of the university community before starting classes. It’s time for
  • Announcements
  • Felicitating achievers
  • Sharing a valuable thought or experience to give inspiration for the day
  • Praying together for God’s blessings.
  • Special assemblies are organized to celebrate events of national and societal importance.
• Student Development Program
  • Every semester, for every class, inputs given following a master plan during a 3-day workshop on
    • Ethics and values
    • Cultural harmony
    • Working in a group
    • Leadership qualities
  • Induction Program organised for the first semester students. One sample program is in the link below:
    https://documents.dbuniversity.ac.in/naacdocs/criteria07/7.2.1/Sample_Induction_Programme.pdf
  • Internal as well as external Resource Persons engaged.
• Mentoring System:
  • Every student is assigned a mentor, a faculty member from the student’s department
  • Each faculty member has 15 – 20 mentees.
  • Generally, mentor-mentee relationship continues for the entire duration of the programme.
  • Mentor maintains a file for each mentee, records
    • Personal details
    • Academic background
    • Contacts of parents
    • Academic records in this university
    • Co-curricular and extra-curricular engagements and achievements
    • Problems faced if any and details of how they were resolved
      Sample of mentoring files:
      https://documents.dbuniversity.ac.in/naacdocs/criteria07/7.2.1/Sample_Mentoring_Files.pdf
  • Ensures day-to-day care of the students during the whole duration of study.

B. Promoting Joyful Living, Developing Leadership Qualities, building an inclusive community through following entities:

• Campus Association:
  • Consists of representatives from students, faculty, staff and management.
  • Student representatives are democratically elected, one boy and one girl from each class.
  • Class representatives elect their own Student Coordinator and two Assistant Student Coordinators, a boy and a girl. Thus gender bias is eliminated.
  • The campus association plans and executes co-curricular and extra-curricular activities. The link below gives the notification for the various years regarding roles and responsibilities.
    https://documents.dbuniversity.ac.in/naacdocs/criteria07/7.2.1/Campus_Association_Notification_Roles_Responsibiities.pdf
• Student Activity Clubs:
  • All students are enrolled in one or more clubs.
  • Discipline specific co-curricular clubs enhance classroom learning.
  • Extra-curricular clubs like Music & singing, Dance, Drama, Art & Craft, Literary and sports clubs organize events and competitions to bring out the talents of students.
  • Every club has an elected executive body of students and nominated faculty advisors.
  • Many students develop their leadership potential; all learn to work in a team carrying out club-activities.

Entities to prepare for future careers:

• Training and Placement Cell provides soft-skill training, assistance for internship in industries and job placements.
• Entrepreneurship Development and Incubation Centre creates awareness and guides students for entrepreneurship.
• Career Guidance Cell informs and guides students for higher studies and competitive examinations.
• Institutional Innovation Cell, with the collaboration of academic departments and clubs, provides research orientation and promotes an innovative mindset in the students

BEST PRACTICE-2

Blended Teaching-Learning and Evaluation System

Objective:

By blended, we mean judicious mix of offline and online methods. Category-wise, objectives are:-

• Continue with the conventional offline methods of teaching- learning in the class rooms and traditional methods of evaluation.
• Include online methods -
  • Provide opportunity for learning ‘anytime’ and ‘anywhere’ beyond routine hours for better utility of ‘off hours’. Using online formative assessment for continuous learning is an added advantage.
  • Offer additional learning materials from authentic valuable sources
  • Conduct part or whole of In-semester and End semester Examinations in online mode to overcome difficulties that may come all of a sudden.

The Context

• Today’s students are very familiar and are even addicted to devices for online access for entertainment and social communication. Online teaching provides a welcome alternative to classroom teaching for such students
• High quality online resources in synchronous / asynchronous mode are available like NPTEL, SWAYAM, spoken Tutorials, webinars, eBooks. These provide an opportunity to the students to be taught by experienced and expert faculty from reputed institutions, using a communication medium they are comfortable with.
• There are many free online platforms available for teaching – Google Classroom, Google Meet, Zoom, MOODLE, etc.
• In case of forced shutdown of institutions as in COVID-19, online mode is the only option.
• The Internet connectivity is not reliable in rural areas. Hence a blend of synchronous and asynchronous mode of teaching is desirable.

The Practice

• Spoken Tutorial: Our university has been collaborating with IIT Bombay in the Spoken Tutorial project from 2015. https://documents.dbuniversity.ac.in/naacdocs/criteria07/7.2.1/ABDU as Resource Centre & Knowledge Partner of IIT Bombay.pdf We adopted Spoken Tutorials in our regular teaching-learning from 2015 and currently 26 tutorials are available in our institutional intranet including C/C++, Java, Latex, Linux, Python, PHP and MySQL, SCI Lab, QCad and Advanced C. This has been embedded into our laboratory curriculum.
• NPTEL: Video lectures for around 56000+ hours videos of NPTEL (National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning) courses are made available in our intranet for our faculty, staff and students.
  (http://14.139.209.82:8002) through which the university community gets access to the expertise available in the seven premier IITs and IISC, Bangalore. Faculty members suggest the courses to the students for additional learning related to their regular courses in their curriculum. We have also become an NPTEL Local Chapter providing opportunities for certification in NPTEL courses. That enhances one’s skill set in the CV. Credit transfer from such certificaton is being considered for the campus degree programs. Both students and faculty members are motivated and are benefiting from this facility. See list at: https://documents.dbuniversity.ac.in/naacdocs/criteria07/7.2.1/Certification_by_Faculty_&_Students_NPTEL_Courses.pdf
• COVID-19 challenged us to adopt new ways of teaching and learning. Relying on our earlier experience of working in online mode, we ventured into a fully online mode of teaching. Study materials (videos, presentations and text handouts) were prepared and shared with students ahead of scheduled classes. Online class hours were utilised for further explanation and clearing of doubts. To ensure learning outcomes are achieved, at the end of every class, few questions are given to the students to answer and submit within stipulated time. This also helped to monitor the attendance of students. Reports of online classes and tests available at: https://documents.dbuniversity.ac.in/naacdocs/criteria07/7.2.1/Online_classes_during_COVID-19.pdf
  https://documents.dbuniversity.ac.in/naacdocs/criteria07/7.2.1/Internal_Assessment_Evaluation_during_COVID-19.pdf
• End semester examinations were conducted online using the platform eVeritas – University18, developed for our distance education programs. For this proctored examination system, the computer generates a unique question paper of similar standard for each examinee by random selection of questions from a bank of questions. The rules for the random selection of questions are encoded in a separate template called Regulations. The template incorporates Bloom’s Taxonomy levels for comprehensive assessment of the entire syllabus.
  Sample Regulation and question bank can be found at:
  https://documents.dbuniversity.ac.in/naacdocs/criteria07/7.2.1/Sample Regulations & Questions.xlsx
• Use of MOODLE as an LMS: Apart using Google Classroom, Google Meet Zoom, WhatsApp, we have adopted MOODLE as an LMS and trained our faculty to use it effectively.