Enhancing Institutionalized Transformation through Design, Implement and Evaluate a PBL Pedagogical Development Certificate Program for HITAM, India

Higher education institutes are facing mounting challenges in educating innovative graduates who are capable of handling increasingly complex problems, communicating and collaborating in teamwork settings, coping with the unpredictability of professions, and contributing to sustainable development. To achieve these goals, they are shifting towards a human-centered approach to change management, and more specifically, encouraging the substitution of traditionally lecture-based methods with innovative and effective pedagogies. Engineering Higher education in India is no exception. Educational transformation is a complex matter, and many questions arise in its wake. Strategically, there is a need for both top-down and bottom-up activities in the system and plans for change at both the organizational and the individual levels. In particular, the teaching role of engineering teachers must be emphasized as they play a central role in educating innovative students. Engineering teachers’ motivation, efficacy and skills are key factors for the successful implementation of student-centered strategies. Engineering teachers, who are often experts in various disciplines, are therefore in need of organizational support to explore and practice alternative and innovative pedagogical methods. Over the past years, professional development activities have been organized nationally and internationally, nevertheless, most of them are in forms of short-term information transmission-based activities.
HITAM’s vision is to become a role model inter disciplinary technological university of national repute in India offering quality undergraduate engineering to make students confident about their careers and contribute to society. HITAM emphasizes a performance-oriented culture and operational efficiency for which various initiatives are adopted. HITAM believes in engineering students “Doing Engineering” rather than just studying it.
The current program is thus an effort to support HITAM to enhance an institutionalized approach to transformation through promoting change agent development through enabling engineering teachers to construct student-centered learning models for their own programs and classrooms, to devote to the scholarship of teaching and learning, and to advance pedagogical leadership and agency. Accordingly, the program invites participants to develop teaching/pedagogical leadership skills and become change agents, rather than merely reproducing teaching techniques for information transmission. The program includes a total of three cohorts with around 30 participants for each cohort. An additional uniqueness of this program is to emphasize local leadership development and support the first cohort of participants to become the local mentors who can act as change agents in their local environment to support long-term change at a larger scope.