R&D and Technical Education

 

Pankaj Jalote

Department of Computer Science and Engg

I. I. T. Kanpur

jalote [AT] iitk.ac.in

 

 

The need for technical education is growing rapidly in the world due to the changing economic and industrial scenario which is increasingly becoming more high-tech, requiring a higher level of education from employees and workers. In India, the demand has grown exponentially, fueled largely by the boom in knowledge-based industries like the IT sector. This increased demand for higher education is currently being serviced largely by private colleges – of the more than 1500 engineering colleges probably less than 10% are government sponsored. The situation with medicine might be somewhat similar.

 

Though for meeting the demand for education, having private colleges is clearly required, so far these colleges have, by-and-large, not been able to provide quality education. The basic model for most of these colleges is to be a teaching-only place, with no participation in any R&D activity. Consequently, the faculty they hire is of lower educational qualifications. Most of the colleges will employ graduates, with a few having postgraduate degrees, for teaching. Another assumption in their education model is that if the syllabus and lecture notes are set, then all the teacher has to do is to “speak them out” and the students will learn. In other words, an assumption is that the teacher himself (herself) does not need to have any expertise in the subject being taught. They only need to know enough to be able to deliver the material in class. This approach was taken to its limit in the franchise based education businesses, where lecture notes, along with problems and homework, were made available to teachers, who would just output this material in the class.

 

For any education, and technical education in particular, this is a wrong model which will inevitably lead to poor quality education. In general, for proper instruction, if the teacher has to teach some material, then he must know much more than the material to be actually taught. Only when one possesses advanced knowledge about a subject does one understand the overall perspective and the role of basic knowledge of that subject. So, for example, a teacher who has learned advanced mechanics can appreciate Newtonian physics a lot better and can consequently teach is better. Similarly, a teacher who teaches arithmetic can understand it better and consequently explain it better if he understands algebra.

 

This basic principle of education is almost universally followed in schools, with most schools requiring graduation or post graduation for teaching children in schools. Imagine what will be the quality of instruction in class IX, if the teacher teaching mathematics or science was himself only class XII pass! And yet, in many of these private technical colleges we have the situation where a student may become a teacher soon after graduation and for the program from which he has graduated!

 

In technical education, the need for in-depth knowledge is even more acute. In engineering, relationship to practice is what gives true understanding of tools, techniques, and concepts that are taught in a course, as the basic goal of most of the courses is to help apply concepts to solve some problems. Without this understanding of relationship between the concepts being taught to practice, the material that will be taught will be highly conceptual and unsuitable for training engineers. To understand this relationship to practice, either the teacher should be such that he knows the concepts and is also a practitioner, or should have much higher and deeper level of knowledge in the subject such that linkages are well understood.

 

Furthermore, in most engineering disciplines, knowledge is dynamic and is rapidly changing. In this scenario, it is not possible to provide any decent instruction through the use of old notes the teacher made a decade ago. For instruction to be current, the teacher must constantly update his knowledge. This learning for up-gradation is hard and time consuming, and if a person is not a specialist in an area with a good knowledge, it becomes almost impossible. Only a person who specializes in an area and already possesses a good knowledge base about that area can regularly upgrade the knowledge in line with latest developments.

 

One way to satisfy both these requirements is for the teacher to be a researcher in the area in which he teaches. A researcher, in order to produce new knowledge (the basic objective of research), has to understand the past and recent developments in that area. Furthermore, to have his work accepted will generally require review by other researchers in the area – this ensures that the researcher has current knowledge of the field and that his understanding is proper. In other words, doing research in an area improves the understanding of the subject as well as makes the knowledge current. This occurs, even if the research output itself is not of top-quality. In other words, the process of doing research provides these side benefits, which is quite independent of the actual output of the R&D activity itself.

 

Another key factor why engaging in research helps education is related to the quality of manpower. Generally speaking, in today’s world, the best quality people require freedom in their work and have a strong desire to “make a mark”. Both these needs cannot be satisfied within a teaching-only institution, where scope of innovation and creating something is limited. And both of these are well supported by the research activity – the researcher has the freedom to select the problems he works on, and through his research he creates new knowledge which is published under his authorship. This is a very strong motivating factor and very good people across the world sacrifice other benefits for academic freedom and possibilities to create and innovate. In fact, these are the primary reasons why the best people join top universities and research labs, and are the main factors why people remain in such academic institutions despite more lucrative opportunities elsewhere. It is safe to say that it is almost impossible to get the good people to come as faculty in the teaching-only places, and if an institute wants bright and competent people as faculty, that institute must support and encourage R&D by faculty.

 

It is due to these reasons that most US universities, as well as most Universities in the West, Australia, Japan etc., require Ph.D. as the minimum qualification for a faculty position, even if the University is primarily a teaching university. Furthermore, all these universities actively encourage their faculty to participate in R&D and most evaluation procedures for faculty attach a heavy weight to R&D activity. This is true even of lower rung universities who do not hope or expect to make any significant dent in the knowledge world, where the major contributions are made largely by a few institutions.

 

This high correlation between R&D and teaching can be seen in the rankings and perceptions of various Universities in the US. Most of the highest ranking schools for undergraduate education are also the highest ranking research schools. These are places like MIT, Berkely, Illinois, Princeton, Cornell, CMU, etc. Though there are some exceptions, by-and-large there is a very high degree of correlation between the quality of education and quality of R&D of universities. Even in India, the places that are best in education are also the best in R&D (e.g. IITs, IISc, NITs/RECs,…). Even within the private colleges/universities, the ones that are now regarded as good education places are ones where they have Ph.D.s in their faculty and where R&D is an important function of a faculty member (e.g. BITS, Manipal, IIITs, …)

 

This clearly implies that if the level of education of our colleges is to be improved, an impetus must be given to get some degree of R&D going in colleges and universities engaged in technical and science education. Improving syllabi, or doing short term teachers training programs, will only have an effect for a short time. For maintaining the quality of education year after year, the teachers must engage in R&D. At the very least, this thrust on R&D will require that these colleges must be mandated to have all or most of their faculty possess post graduate degrees in relevant disciplines with a certain percentage of faculty having Ph.D.s in relevant area. It does not make any sense to have a B.E. teach B.E. classes!

 

Emphasizing R&D may also require a shift on how government grants are disbursed. It will be beneficial to education if a portion of government funds for education are disbursed as grants for furthering R&D through established processes of proposal evaluation and submission of reports at the end. All colleges should be allowed to complete for these funds so there is an incentive even in private institutions to engage in research. In the US, for example, a lot of funding for the universities comes through research grants, which are mostly given by government agencies. Even in private universities, which do not get any direct government funding, a good percentage of their revenue comes from these R&D grants.

 

There is also an economic implication of having a college/university engage in R&D, even if the R&D activity itself is supported through research grants. For supporting R&D, colleges and Universities engaged in technical education must account for the effort a faculty will have to put in R&D activities and load the teachers suitably. Clearly, if a teacher is required to teach a lot, one cannot expect him to either engage in R&D or upgrading of course material. This is the situation in schools, where teachers spend most of their time in teaching related activities. But, for schools this is fine as they are dealing with relatively “fixed” knowledge. Extending this model to technical and higher education, which some colleges try to do to reduce their teaching faculty, leads to outdated and low quality teaching. R&D can only be encouraged by keeping reasonable teaching load – the level of teaching load being determined by the level of R&D activity the university/college is able/interested/willing to engage in. It goes without saying that R&D encouragements should be done with proper safeguards such that faculty members do not use it as an excuse to teach less, but not engage in any R&D.

 

Unless R&D is made an integral part of colleges/universities engaged in higher education, particularly technical education, education from these places will keep getting further outdated and poorer. To improve the quality of education, the focus should be partly shifted from improving education and syllabi in these places to improving the R&D culture of these places. And to facilitate this, a big impetus will need to be given to the production of PhDs in our country, such that more Ph.D.s are available for faculty posts.

 

Pankaj Jalote is a Professor of Computer Science in IIT Kanpur. These are his personal views.