Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Observations about Academia

I met a principal of an engineering college in Hyderabad. We got to talking. The topic turned to evaluation of faculty members. I have several posts on how, in the present way of administering things, you cannot reward good performance of teachers. Having worked in industry for a long time, rewarding performance is something routine and one of the best tool to encourage someone to give his/her best. I discovered that is not possible here, how do you provide positive reinforcement  to some one doing well!


Having listened through a lot of presentations, I was a little surprised how performance issues are never discussed in such gatherings. Performance issues, particularly, teaching performance need to be evaluated and really good teachers need to be encouraged. Looks like this issues is an aversion universally. I have been following up on "lecture capture" for sometime now. One of the biggest barrier seems to be the aversion of teachers to appear in such lecture capture sessions.The resistance coming from the fact that the video may be used for evaluation. Student evaluation, often is not usable. Then what do you use for evaluation. Research performance and other aspects may not tell you anything about the teaching capabilities.


There is another side to teaching capabilities, comments on that later.

No comments: