ACM India Education Webinar on 8 May with Abhiram G. Ranade: "Competency Based Education: A Personal Perspective"

April 28, 2021

The next session of the ACM India Education Webinar Series for college and university faculty members is on another significant topic: the important role to be played by them in making the graduates competent by instilling the right kind of disposition in addition to imparting the appropriate knowledge and skills.

Register now for "Competency Based Education: A Personal Perspective", to be presented on Saturday 8 May 2021 at 11 am IST by Abhiram Ranade, Past President of ACM India Council.

Registrations are limited, so please register early and secure your spot. All educators, academicians, industry professionals and students are welcome to attend the webinar. Feel free to forward this communication to those who would be interested.

Note : You can also stream this webinar on your mobile device, including smartphone and tablet.

Duration : 60 minutes (including audience Q&A)

Abstract: Abstract: In competency-based learning, learning is viewed as the development of the competency to perform a specific task using appropriate information, skill and disposition. While these elements are present in the more common outcome-based view of education (OBE), the disposition element is emphasized more strongly in competency based learning. "Disposition" could be summarized as a professional attitude, which includes ownership, perseverance, attentional to detail, and so on. This is roughly the position taken in the recently-released ACM/IEEE-CS Computing Curricula 2020 (CC2020) framework.

In this talk, I will present my perspective on how to implement the ideas of CC2020. The crux I believe, is the need for creating excitement and enthusiasm in the minds of the students about the task, the information and the skills. This excitement could be construed as a part of the "disposition," though CC 2020 does not explicitly take this position. But, I feel excitement and enthusiasm form the foundation of disposition.

Excitement and enthusiasm are not easy to inculcate, however. Excitement will appear if we persuade the student of the elegance and power of the subject. For enthusiasm, we need to provide systematic skill development avenues. And there is a lot of synergy: understanding the importance of the task and the elegance of the ideas will nudge the student into putting more effort; if the effort leads to skill development that the student herself can notice, it will produce a thirst for learning more. I will discuss these ideas in the context of programming, data structures, and algorithm design.

Presenter:
ACM India Council Past President Abhiram G. Ranade received his BTech degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay in 1981 and a doctorate in Computer Science from Yale University in 1989. He was an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley during 1988-95. Since 1995, he has served on the faculty of IIT Bombay, currently as a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. His research interests are in Algorithms and Combinatorial Optimization. He has won Excellence in Teaching Awards of IIT Bombay in 2006-7 and 2010-11. He has published a book, An Introduction to Programming through C++ (McGraw-Hill Education India). He has also offered this course as a MOOC through NPTEL SWAYAM.

Host:
Chitra Babu, Sri Sivasubramaniya Nadar College of Engineering, Chennai