In the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in India, the number of engineering institutions grew from under 10 to over 500 from 1978 to 2008. This resulted in a severe shortage of good quality teachers and therefore poor quality of graduating students. In India, the employability of engineering graduates is 25%. Considering the scale and wickedness of the problem, the lead author and her team worked on designing innovative and radical solutions to this problem during the last eight years. We restrict our research focus to those colleges who responded to our call for partnership in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and to the center, EnhanceEdu, we created at IIIT (International Institute of Information Technology) at Hyderabad. We present the EnhanceEdu design story using a new pragmatic approach called Design Story Research (DeStoRe) which has its basis in Design Science Research. An overarching design story frames past, present and future work of an entity, seeing possibilities for radical innovation.

In this paper, we describe a scalable learning analytics platform which runs generalized analytics models on educational data in parallel. As a proof of concept, we use this platform as a base for an end-to-end automated writing feedback system. The system allows students to view feedback on their writing in near real-time, edit their writing based on the feedback provided, and observe the progression of their performance over time. Providing students with detailed feedback is an important part of improving writing skills and an essential component towards solving Bloom's "two sigma" problem in education. We evaluate the effectiveness of the feedback for students with an ongoing pilot study with 800 students who are using the learning analytics platform in a college English course.

One of the pressing issues in the Indian IT education today is an acute shortage of skilled teachers. While common sense says that we should use IT to do teacher training and student training, it is not clear how that may be done and in how many different ways the teachers can be helped. The project, described in this article, studies contextualized solutions for the improvement of IT education in Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) in India. This project is being conducted at EnhanceEdu, Centre for Educational Technology and Learning Sciences at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-Hyderabad). This project takes an action research (AR) approach in order to design, implement, and study the impact of new support structures for teacher training. These support structures include learning materials, teaching materials, and educational technology tools such as Learning by Doing (LbD) online courses, Open Education Resources, automatic assessment and small private online courses. This project is yielding important understanding in organizing teacher training programs, and searching for the best ways to use educational technology as a part of teacher training. The wider future implications include improved teacher training, improved IT education in Indian HEIs, and better equipped graduates from Indian IT universities. This paper describes the current phase and future scope of this project exploration.

Learning English is an important and challenging task for most of the Indian students. Though there are several works in mobile assisted language learning (MELL), yet in the Indian scenario, very little published research attempts exist to categorize and specify instructional design guidelines for MELL as part of the regular curricula. In this paper we attempt to address the gap. We report the first phase of our project where (1) we discuss the design and implementation of a Mobile-Web learning platform. The Mobile-Web interfaces for this system follow the REST architectural pattern, and it is available for use. (2) We illustrate how outcome-based instructional design (ID) may be fashioned for distributed learning, and finally (3) we justify how a mobile-web platform can act as a companion to the traditional classroom and supplement learning. We adopt the Transactional Distance (TD) theory as the foundational model and identify effective Engaged Pedagogy in order to reduce the transactional distance. The work reported here is being carried out at the department of Humanities & Sciences, VNR VJIET, Hyderabad, India.

E-learning programs have often been plagued with high attrition rates and poor assignment submissions. Earlier research has shown that students active in discussion forums tend to perform better. However, as there are not enough students who actively engage in e-learning interactions, the retention of students in e-learning programs tends to be poor. This is even more prevalent in rural Indian colleges where e-learning programs are offered outside the regular academic curriculum. In our case, as we, Enhance Edu were offering an e -learning program to tier 2 and tier 3 colleges in mostly rural areas consisting of students with poor English language skills and poor IT skills, the situation is even more exasperating. In this paper, we validate that those students active in discussion forums got better final grades showing improved performance. Furthermore, our multiple interventions helped to engage more students to participate, as observed in the increase in the forum participation and submissions per student, improving retention rates and producing a behavioural change.

Lectures and little emphasis is on student involvement. To enhance the skills of the students/learners they need to be involved in the learning process. This paper describes the use of Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) in an engineering and management college in Andhra Pradesh, India. Though POGIL has been developed and validated extensively over the last 15 years in the US, it is quite new in the Indian scenario and in Engineering and Management education. The authors share the process steps followed in introducing POGIL in the classroom and highlight the changes that they observed in the students and the teachers after introducing POGIL. The authors observed increased classroom interaction and improved grades in students. These positive findings encourage the authors to further use POGIL in engineering and management and spread POGIL to other colleges.

Professors at VNR VJIET have found engineering students to be less interested in their chemistry courses than in their engineering ones. To motivate these students and enhance their educational experience in chemistry, we implemented changes to our curriculum with the support of a number of technological tools. One of these tools is MediaWiki which facilitated collaboration among instructors on lesson plans and learning outcomes. Other tools such as videos and animations allowed students to visualize the fabrication and working processes at various industries and laboratories. The changes made were successful in fostering student engagement and increased learning.

The paper presents an alternate approach of teaching electronics by hands on activities instead of the conventional approach of classroom lectures and structured lab sessions. The current work applies the notion of Butterfly Model in developing three Learning by Doing (LbD) courses in Electronics viz. Digital System Design Using Verilog, VLSI Architectures, Topics in Embedded Systems. The effectiveness of these courses has been tested in the classroom on a population of 250 students with around 195 people giving positive feedback.

A scarcity in qualified and motivated teachers is a common problem in most Indian engineering colleges and specifically in the state of Andhra Pradesh where engineering colleges have increased exponentially in the last decade [1]. Additionally, a vast majority of the available teachers have no formal training in teaching unlike their counterparts in degree institutions and schools, ultimately affecting the quality of their teaching and thus the quality of the graduating students [2]. EnhanceEdu, has conceived the Art of Teaching workshop wherein MediaWiki was used as a platform for teachers to collaboratively work and design lesson plans incorporating Learner Styles, Bloom's taxonomy, Rubric design and Active teaching techniques. Over 200 teachers have been trained in the last one year through these workshops. MediaWiki not only helped teachers to integrate multimedia resources into lesson plans but also helped EnhanceEdu to remotely monitor post-workshop challenges and provide additional support.

Content delivered in the wiki model has its own limitations. One being, learners with different learning styles have difficulty going through material that is not suited to their preferred learning style (audio, text, video etc.). This problem is particularly compounded when we have teachers who are not experts and cannot guide the students well. Another limitation is that it is difficult for a novice to navigate. Also normally the expectation from a good teacher is the ability to provide examples and walk through an interactive process of learning. Then again, we have the need to cater to students with differing abilities in learning based on their own background and interest. Thus content should be suitable to cater to learners who may be at a novice, intermediate or advanced level. We also need to have content that can be developed to cater to the learning levels of students in both urban and rural settings in India. Having worked with over 60 engineering colleges and having trained over 320 faculty members, we found that there is a serious need for one model that can address all these limitations. This has led to content development in the “Butterfly Model” with the “Learning by Doing” methodology at its foundation. This paper discusses in detail our studies and feedback received for four courses developed in this model. This model we feel will be applicable to a wide range of learners and also help in enhancing the quality of learning of the students.

Engineering colleges in India have been increasing tremendously in the last 10 years. However, most of these engineering colleges are inadequately equipped with suitable infrastructure and qualified faculty members leading to lack of quality in undergraduate education resulting in unemployable graduates. These graduates lack problem solving skills, soft skills, and are unable to map their academic knowledge to real world problems. To enhance the quality of education in engineering colleges, an innovative Certificate in Information Technology (CIT) program using learning by doing methodology was started. We have worked with over 50engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh, India, to train their faculty members and implement student training referred to as Student Enhancement Program (STEP) at the colleges. This paper focuses primarily on the main challenges that we have faced during STEP implementation. We highlight solutions that we have implemented for overcoming these challenges and discuss how we can scale them further.

A lot of importance is given to training students in technical subjects so that they can get a science or engineering degree leading to a job that provides financial security. There is no doubt that such an effort will succeed in preparing technologically proficient students who may be successful in obtaining jobs with handsome salaries. However, as educators and human beings, we must broaden our view of teaching objectives and educate our students to cultivate their minds to look at the whole picture or totality of life, to develop awareness and sensitivity to the environment around them and a deeper understanding of the problems and issues that they face in their lives. This paper provides details on EnhanceEdu team's efforts to design and teach a “Human values” course to engineering college teachers in a teacher training program (TTP) along with technical courses on subjects related to computer science and engineering. EnhanceEdu, a joint initiative of Ministry of Communications (MCIT) and IIIT-H (International Institute of Information Technology — Hyderabad) works towards empowering individuals and communities by enhancing the quality of education. The purpose of such a program is to foster integrative learning across several disciplines and to empower teachers to impart similar training to engineering students at the respective colleges they are employed with. EnhanceEdu adopts a sound pedagogical model called “Learning by Doing” (LBD) for all the courses designed and developed as part of its curriculum: technical courses, human values course as well as additional soft skills that include topics such as time management, active listening and personality development. Through the integrative learning process, teacher-mentors who receive the training are able to connect skills and knowledge gained from multiple sources along with their own life experiences and actively apply concepts of human values into their daily lives. This model of integrative learning could provide an innovative example to other educational institutions that currently focus on providing technical education but appreciate the value of training students to evolve into not just graduates with sound technology skills but into self-aware, caring and sensitive citizens who make meaningful contributions to society on the basis of their education and talents.

The paper reports a novel approach of self teaching Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) to Computer Science students through the use of a Virtual laboratory. It formalizes the notion of hierarchical design of Integrated Circuits and abstracts the notion of design of integrated circuits based on physical approaches. Using the developed Virtual VLSI Laboratory, a set of about 100 Computer Science students have been trained and the feedback from them indicates that more than 80% of these students could understand the experiments being taught through the Virtual Laboratory and 70% of the students were interested in the field of VLSI Design after doing experiments in the lab.

There has been a rapid increase in number of engineering colleges in India in the recent decade. Scarcity of qualified and motivated faculty is a common problem. To enhance the quality of education in engineering colleges, an innovative Certificate in Information Technology (CIT) program was started by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) and IIIT-Hyderabad (International Institute of Information Technology). EnhanceEdu, a division of IIIT-H, has worked with over 50 engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh, India, and trained their faculty on a variety of technical and non-technical subjects. This paper shares the results of a study where two groups of teachers were given mentor-assisted 2-day workshops on "Art of Teaching" in two separate sessions, where the master trainer used personalization techniques with one group and not with the other. Teachers were expected to collaborate, create online lessons and present to the participants of the workshop. Enhanced collaboration between members, reduced time for creation of lessons, in-depth content and improved design of assessment questions were observed with the lessons created by the group where learning was personalized.

Technology is changing and at a very rapid pace. New tools are being developed and coming to the forefront on almost a daily basis. Instructor-led workshops that train faculty and students in the use of new tools can be expensive propositions for educational institutions. Scalability and ensuring uniformity in delivery of content become challenges. To address the problem of making the training cost-effective and to facilitate self-paced, independent learning in large groups, EnhanceEdu employed three different training approaches to provide hands-on workshops in the use of the open source tool, MediaWiki, to an audience of students and teachers from various colleges in India. This paper describes the three approaches employed in conducting the hands-on workshops. It also determines the factors that contribute toparticipants' engagement in learning and the likelihood that they will continue to use the new tool.

An explosion of educational institutes in India has caused a dearth of experienced faculty for teaching. The employability of graduating engineering students is low, owing perhaps to their weak training. To help overcome this problem, an innovative Certificate in Information Technology (CIT) program was started. Through this program, faculty members of engineering colleges are trained who then are expected to train the students at their colleges. We have worked with over 40 engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh, trained their faculty and have begun implementing this program for the students through the faculty at their respective colleges. Our experience and learning from this approach has had good results. They have also shown that personalization for the benefit of the learner needs to be given a higher emphasis. This has led to content development in the "Butterfly Model" with the "Learning by Doing" methodology at its foundation. This paper discusses in detail the basis for our selecting this model and about our initial studies and feedback received for three courses developed in this model. The feedback for this model is encouraging and we expect to develop more courses in this model in the future. This model will be applicable to a wide range of learners and will help in enhancing the quality of learning of the graduates.

The shortage of experimental platforms needed for learning IT systems in a hands-on way is one reason for the lack of quality education in the area of IT. For most students who have access to a PC, their ability to experiment on that machine is limited by the risk of possible irrecoverable damage their experimentation may cause to the equipment. We report the development of a 'Virtual Laboratory for Systems and Software' that teaches the basics of Linux. The goal of this laboratory is to give the students a platform through which they can learn the essentials of linux. The student interacts with a virtual instance of a linux machine through the browser on his machine to learn basic tasks of linux system administration. The student's machine could be running any operating system (not necessarily linux). This obviates the need to have a linux machine on the part of the student. The lab consists of a suite of experiments designed as web applications which are based on IT Workshop courses at undergraduate level in universities.

To enhance the quality of IT education in Indian engineering colleges, we started a Teacher Training Program (TTP) in 2008. Through this TTP an effort was made to provide the faculty members hands-on experience in a myriad of skills/tools necessary to integrate technology into teaching and learning activities through the "Learning by Doing" (LBD) methodology. The focus of this paper is on the integration of these efforts into the TTP and to discuss our formative evaluation of our training process using Kirkpatrick's model. As this is an ongoing program, these results will be fed back to future training programs.

Individuals differ in their abilities to learn new concepts. However, traditional learning paradigms treat all individuals alike and standardize learning materials and delivery systems. We have observed that customized learning environments in the learning by doing mode enhance the learning experience better than standardized learning environments. The preliminary results of our research based on training 155 faculty members from 36 engineering colleges are encouraging and point to the potential benefits of multiple levels of personalization and customization which we have explored.