IIT Kharagpur to deploy seniors as shadow teachers

Kolkata: Besides the regular faculty, IIT Kharagpur students would now get shadow teachers outside their classrooms to make the learning more inclusive. The premier engineering institute has now decided to prepare a group of best students from each class to teach other students.

"From this academic session we will start a group of 10-12 students who are senior and very good in studies. They would also be given a stipend to act as shadow teachers. This would be a parallel system of learning outside the class," IIT Kharagpur director Partha Pratim Chakrabarti said.

The new system will ensure that no student is left out of the learning process. "We will also be able to track the problems which these students are facing when it comes to learning," the director said.As a trial, the concept of shadow teaching has been tested in the computer science department for the last three years. They were known as 'student self help groups'.

"And now we will start it in other departments from this year for the first year students," Chakrabarti said.Another aspect of peer to peer learning would be through Moodle, an open-source education software for online learning. "We have assigned a room for this where students can put queries and other students or teachers can answer it. Everything would be available online," the director said.