Online Courses@IITGN (ft. Indian Knowledge Systems): Tête-à-Tête with Prof. Michel Danino
“If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions, I should point to India.” — Friedrich Max Müller, 19th-century philologist, orientalist and a major contributor to the academic field of Indian studies and the discipline of Study of Religions
The novel coronavirus disease is burning down the world at an alarming pace. It has fundamentally upturned our lives and has altered all aspects of our lifestyles. We are now standing face-to-face with the new normals and they are very different from the old ones. Within the last four to five months, online technology and digital spaces have greatly influenced almost all the areas and sectors, ranging from education, work, and healthcare, all the way to the latest research and innovations, and this list is long.
The educational institutions across the globe have shifted their teaching paradigm from classrooms to online learning as an active effort to mitigate the spread of this viral illness. There are two ways to impart online education: MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), which involve the use of recorded classes to educate the public, and online classes conducted as webinars or Zoom/Google Meet sessions. This allows teaching a large number of people from the comfort of their homes, across the country and world.
Recently, I had an interaction with Michel Danino*, faculty in the discipline of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Gandhinagar, about a few aspects of online education and Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), a semester-long course taught at the Institute.
Initiated in the year 2016, this course provides an opportunity to interact with distinguished scholars (from IITGN as well as different parts of the country) and gain an understanding of the shared Indian concepts and practices in domains such as arts, literature, polity, governance, geography, pilgrimage, ecology, religion, sciences, and technologies, among other knowledge systems of classical India.
The New Normal of Academia
Discussing how online learning has become the new normal of academia in the COVID-19 stricken world, Prof Danino remarked, “Online education has been around for some years, especially in the US. It is undoubtedly a powerful tool, and, in the present context of a pandemic, offers those students who were pursuing regular courses some degree of continuity in their learning. Imagine the disruption that would have occurred in the pre-Internet days! At least a sharp hiatus can be avoided thanks to online learning.”
Even with its numerous benefits, Prof Danino explained, online education takes some getting used to since it has a few limitations. For instance, the instructor generally does not (physically) see the students, which can be disorienting and must, therefore, find other ways to engage with them. Also, more self-discipline will clearly be expected from the student, since the level of teacher-student interaction in this mode of education will not be comparable to that of conventional classroom courses. “I don’t think online education can ever replace real-life contact between an instructor and students, which has its own unique chemistry. Online education is largely anonymous and disembodied, except perhaps for exceptional teachers with a small number of students. But we should still be grateful for this tool, especially in the present times,” he added.
A Glimpse into the IKS Course
We moved on to discussing the Indian Knowledge Systems course. According to Prof Danino, its special format arose from the realization that while eminent scholars can always be invited to the Institute for delivering individual lectures, most of those do not leave much long-term impact in the end. After thinking this through, he eventually proposed the idea of a multi-instructor course to Prof Sudhir K Jain (Director, IITGN), which was soon approved; the first season of this course followed in 2016, offering a broad panorama of Indian Knowledge Systems by nine reputed scholars.
“Since then, every year we have chosen a different theme to explore: in 2017 it was Ancient Indian Society; in 2019 (as the course didn’t happen in 2018) we explored Ancient Indian Technologies, and this year we have chosen The Ancient ‘Idea of India’. Of course, the scholars also change with the theme — we have had eight to ten of them for every edition of the course. IKS is an ocean: we could easily have ten or twenty more editions (if we wished) while hardly exhausting this enormous fund of knowledge,” he elaborated.
Its Uniqueness
When asked why the students should attend this course, Prof Danino said that it seems natural enough for many of them to be curious about their country’s intellectual, scientific, technological, literary, and artistic heritage. Explaining further, he described that the idea behind this course was to record its lectures for posterity and ultimately transcribe them. The final objective was to publish yearly sourcebooks on IKS with these transcriptions, as there is a great demand from a number of institutions for genuine material on this domain.
“In fact, authenticity is the hallmark of these lectures: we reject both the standpoint of negationists (who would argue that there is nothing valuable or relevant to today’s world in IKS) and that of the glorifiers (who imagine that ancient India invented everything under the sun and was a perfectly glorious age). That stamp of authenticity, along with the diversity and high caliber of contributing scholars, is what will ensure the course’s long-term impact,” he argued.
Another specific aspect of the course is that it is open to non-IITGN students as well. Typically, 60 to 90 registrations happen every time, with people coming to IIT Gandhinagar to attend the lectures. In the past, students from the National Institute of Design (NID), Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A), CEPT University, and various other local institutions have attended these lectures; there are others who have no particular affiliation. This course has received some very encouraging feedback from the participants. A number of other students, faculty, and staff members from the IITGN community have also followed some of the lecture-sessions.
COVID-19, Online Learning and IKS
All the IKS lectures are put online. In view of the globally spread SARS-CoV-2 infection and the subsequent nationwide lockdowns imposed by the Government of India, the current half-semester of this course has all the remaining lectures being conducted online, through Google Meet for the Institute students and live-streaming on YouTube for everyone else.
Giving his views on the ways in which students can connect with the instructors, Prof Danino said, “In pre-COVID-19 times, there was always some time for interaction between the visiting scholars and the students, whether during or after the lectures. Now that these sessions are online, students can ask questions through the chat and we make sure the scholars have time to respond. Our team (Mana as co-coordinator; Ankita and Arya as TAs) also help keep in close touch with the students.”
The Indian Knowledge Systems course is a credit (elective) course, in which the performance of students is evaluated through reflection notes after each set of lectures by a scholar, a quiz, a short essay, and a final project (poster presentation or, more often, a substantial written assignment). Moreover, the students are also involved through prior readings for every scholar, most of which are shared on the course’s website. Anyone interested in studying Indian Knowledge Systems can join it for free by filling an online registration form available on the course’s website. Also, videos of all lectures (the ones for the current 2020 edition will be ready soon) are put online for continued viewing and build-up of a lasting fund of knowledge on IKS.
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Another article, giving some more insights on the journey of this course, can be accessed here.
The 2nd article of this series can be found here.
* Michel Danino, originally from France, is an Indian author. He was a member of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) and was awarded the Padma Shri (fourth highest civilian honor of the country) in 2017 by the Government of India, for his contributions towards Literature & Education. Moreover, he has been a member of the Indian National Commission for History of Science, INSA.
