Using Web Tools for conducting Seminar on Project

Background

Seminar on Project or simply Seminar is an integral part of VIII semester engineering course. The idea behind this academic activity is to encourage student to come up with an interesting topic connected to academics and make a presentation to an entire class. The entire process of seminar is expected to help student on how to choose a topic; research references to prepare the content for presentation and finally help him get rid of "stage freight" by making presentation to the class.

Choosing the topic is one of the most defining moment of seminar process. It is so because there are too many topics to choose from. Additional for a faculty to see the there is no overlap or duplication of topics is a daunting task. Just imagine a class strength of 120 and the process of checking for duplication and even after choosing a topic each student has to come out with an "abstract" of his seminar topic to be approved by the concerned faculty. A seminar abstract to be approved must indicate two or more references consulted during the preparation of the abstract. So far students were asked to submit the seminar abstract on paper and it was very difficult for a faculty to check all reference.

Our Experiment

For the year 2007-08 we adopted a web-based approach to conduct the entire process of seminar. We asked students to submit seminar abstract along with references via email. We insisted that references must be URL's so that we can verify them at once. Submitted abstracts were read in email form only and references were checked by clicking through them. Duplicate Seminar topics were detected using "search within mail" feature thus reducing the work usualy assocaited with paper based abstract submission.

Once the seminar abstracts were accepted student were asked to prepare upto 15 slides using freely available online presentation tool and submit. Faculty went through the presentation and made suggestion if any and asked students to make the final presentation in the class. Thus paper work was eliminated to 100%.

While our approach simplified our work, it also gave our students to learn using email as means of submitting academic work and also learning using presentation software. The database of all such seminar is maintained is the next batch students are using it as reference.

Indira Umarjee: Bidding Farewell

Immediately after bidding farewell to our final year students last week, CSE department had to arrange for another farewell. This time it was for one of department’s well known faculty Miss. Indira Umarjee who is engaged and as a consequence leaving her job.

All farewells are undesirable and emotional. And this was no exception. Indira is admired by students and appreciated by colleagues a lot. Although she served the department for two short years she is leaving a lasting impression in the minds many students and colleagues.

Indira had a very impressive beginning as a teacher. She had just completed her degree when she joined the department and took up the challenge of teaching to the final year students. What is more interesting is that she voted by the student as the best teacher and had scored more than 90 points in annual student feedback. It is an achievement still eluding most of us in the department.

She is getting married on 11 July 2008. We thank her for all that she did for us- students and faculty and wish her a happy married life.
As fortunate students to have her as your teacher in the last two years, you are requested to record your comments here