Teaching the teachers

The Adhyapana Team ventured into yet another sphere of education by participating in the Faculty Development Program on Free and Open Source Software held at The Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai from 30th November to 4th December 2009. More than 30 teachers from 20 different engineering colleges participated in the program.
The Adhyapana team handled sessions on Qt programming and GTK+ programming. More details on the course and its contents are available in the following link https://foss.tce.edu/index.php

A peek into the IT industry

An article by Deepak was published in DH Education, the educational supplement of the Deccan herald on 17/10/2009. The article discusses the various job opportunities available in the IT industry and the choices available for fresh engineering graduates. The entire article can be found in the following link.

http://deccanheraldepaper.com/pdf/2009/12/17/20091217a_007100.pdf

Making News

The Adhyapana team will be writing educational articles in the Education section of the Deccan Herald newspaper. The first article written by Shiva appeared on 19th November 2009. Here is a link to the article.

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/36642/prepare-run-race.html

Look out for more such articles in the near future.

June to November

I know its been long since the blog has been updated.There have been a lot of activities that we have been involved in since june. It all started with the followup sessions for the Katalyst students. in the months of August and September. On the students' request we conducted a few classes on aptitude which were followed by tests. The students are preparing for their campus recruitment and needed some practice. We have also been conducting regular C classes for students on Sundays.

In October we conducted the Adhyapana course for the second batch of students at Bangalore.The course was conducted over 3 weekends.The students really enjoyed the training sessions with a number of activities and thought provoking sessions.Again it was fun to work with a diverse set of students with varied requirements. Though the course has been completed, we still need to review the resumes!! A detailed report of the course will soon follow.

Adhyapana has also volunteered to mentor a few Katalyst students.This has been a challenging assignment. It takes a lot of effort and time to get to know the student, her needs and provide proper advice.We hope to do a good job of this as well.

Personally also, these months have been filled with activities ranging from travel to new jobs . We are doing a lot of new activities.In the comping months you will see Adhyapana taking up newer activities and challenges.

Transcending Boundaries

The Adhyapana Team conducted its first training session outside Karnataka on the 8th,9th and 10th of May 2009 at The College of Engineering, Pune. This training session was coordinated by Katalyst. It was truly a great learning experience, a different city , a diverse set of students, and a whole new approach to training.

The start to the training was marred by a few (mis)adventures, with one of our team members almost missing the bus to Pune, and then we getting down at a wrong bus stand and literally being taken for a ride all around the city by an autowallah.We finally started the class on the 8th nearly an hour and a half behind schedule with really bored students who were tired of waiting for us!!!

But after that,things got back to normal, thanks to the excellent arrangements made by Anjali, the program coordinator of Katalyst. We were put up at the college guest house and the air conditioned classrooms did surely help us in the sweltering pune heat. Anjali surely ensured that we didn't loose ourselves again by even getting lunch and tea delivered to the classrooms!!!

This training session was also special ,since it was one of the most diverse classes we have handled till date.There were students from Architecture, Medicine, Civil, Mechanical, Metallurgy, Electronics, Computer Science, BSc and the students were from different years as well with varying skill levels.We had come up with a special 3 day course for the students, designed in a way that would benefit everyone .

It was certainly a challenge to win the confidence of the students after the nearly disastrous start but it was even more challenging to retain their attention. The Games and activities came in handy and after a couple of activities all students were back to their attentive best. The first day was totally dedicaded to softskills with special emphasis on communication skills. The second day had a mix of classes with GD, resume writing, vedic maths and C programming. We wound up the course on the third day with some quant, interview sessions and some more C.

We lay a lot of emphasis on student feedback.We take written feedback from the students at the end of each day's training and a quantative feedback at the end of the course. The feedback is throughly analysed and all valid comments are taken as inputs for the next training session.The feedback from the Pune course was highly satisfying . on a scale where 4 is rated as the highest and 1 the lowest, the average rating for the overall course stood at an impressive 3.63. All courses had an average rating of above 3 .

One of the highlights other than the exceptionally good student feedback, was the pune food and hospitality.Mango juices, vada pavs, dal roti, bakarwadi and the exquisite chats, the thought definitely stirs up our hunger. We didn't have much time to shop or go around Pune though other than a visit to M.G.Road.We were back in the bus on sunday evening on our way to Bangalore - a strenous 15 hour journey.We were tired but happy that another training had ended successfully with a very positive feedback.We are now looking forward to the followup course in Pune , later this year.

Caught in the Web

The Adhyapana Team's Website is finally ready. Please visit our website at www.adhyapana.in and provide us your feedback.This is just the first installment of the website ; we plan to add a lot of new content and information in the coming months. In the pipeline are a gallery with updated training photos, online tests, online registeration for our courses, information about our upcoming courses, guestbook,etc. Your thoughts and suggestions about the website are most welcome. Please write to us at info@adhyapana.in

Questioning Answers

The Adhyapana Team has come out with a set of Adhyapana T-shirts. The t-shirts designed by us will be unveiled in our next training session at Pune. The shirts in black and white bear the adhyapana name and motto.

We have chosen "Questioning Answers" as the tag line for the shirts.The phrase encompasses a lot of what we do at Adhyapana. The following are some aspects of our team and training that reflects through this phrase.

Unconventional Approach - Just as it is unconventional to question answers, similarly the entire training methodology adopted by us is unconventional and effective.We use various means to effectively teach students.

Commitment: The Adhyapana Team goes beyond just answering questions. We do not just stop with the course, but also go beyond it and provide support when ever the student needs it.We are totally committed to help students

Independent Thinking: At adhyapana we encourage students to think on their own and not just accept answers to questions.We help them question answers!!.

Freedom to innovate: We provide students with a platform where they can put forward their thoughts without any hesitations. We guide and help them to explore new concepts rather than have hand-holding sessions.

Confidence:Questioning answers needs courage and confidence . Through our course, we aim to make our students more confident of themselves and provide them with the courage to face the placement process.

March Musings

March has been a busy and eventful month for us.We have been involved in a number of activities including our regular training sessions, supporting Katalyst in identifying new students, and working on our future plans.

Many weekends were utilized for the in-house training of the students of Katalyst. It was a unique experience since we were teaching a varied group of students ranging from semesters 1 to 7 with different engineering backgrounds .The students included people from non engineering background as well.It was indeed challenging to retain the attention of all the students and at the same time cater to all their needs. This training session was also one of the longest programs we have conducted in the recent past,streaching for over a month.

The Adhyapana team was also involved in helping Katalyst identify new students for their scholarship program.As a part of this, we helped in organizing college visits and facilitated interactions with students. The team also helped identify deserving students and aided in the post processing of the applications. This was a new experience for us.We learnt a lot through the interactions with the students and the college management.

Another key activity we have taken up this month is to create our website. This was a long pending activity on which we are currently working. Soon we should have our own website and email ids.The coming months surely promises a lot of activity.

Katalytic Reaction

The Adhyapana Team reacently joined hands with Katalyst - an NGO working in the girl child education domain - to help them with their placement training activities. The first training session was held at Katalyst's premisis on 28/2/2009. It was a good experience to interact with students from different colleges and streams. The placement training course for Katalyst will continue in the month of March. We will update the blog with more information in the coming weeks.

Experimental Learning

We visited APS Polytechnic, on 10th Jan as a part of the yearly training sessions we conduct there. Based on last year's feedback,we decided to have shorter sessions, focussed on particular topics. For the first sessions, we chose to concentrate on the basics of communication skills. Yet again, the nmber of students attending the sessions were far more than what we expected - nearly 80 students attended the session.
The session was also special ,due to the precence of Ms. Mahalakshmi from Katalyst who was there to talk to the students about higher education and the support provided by katalyst for pursuing it.

We were also attempting to teach through activities in this session. We had taken up some specific aspects of cummunication and we wanted to illustrate these aspects through activities.The students were very enthusiastic about the session. Several students volunteered to help out with the activities. Some topics we covered as a part of the session are

• importance of two way communication
• listening skills
• Non-verbal communication
• confidence building activities

The response for these sessions were overwhelming. The students thoroughly enjoyed the activities. We have promised to go back to APS with another session soon. Some of the student feedback are added at the end of this post.

Feedback

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This program was very different from other personality development programs i attended.it was very effective and easy to understand because of the games.
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The program was very interesting.there are lots of points which will be very useful.I request you to conduct this session again in our college.
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This program gave me confidence and got me thinking about myself.It was a very good experience.
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I liked this program.I learn about many things which i never thought about before.I am very happy to say that the program was very useful.Please give mores such programs in the coming days.
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The personality development was too interesting. It felt like we were on a picnic.I request you to conduct mores such classes.
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It was very interesting and enjoyable.Thanks for spending your time with us.Please conduct a session on interviews.
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The program was very interesting and made us think about ourselves.You have inspired me to know more about me and what i want to do in the future.

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