Personalization and Mentoring: Our Experience with Training Teachers

There has been a rapid increase in number of engineering colleges in India in the recent decade. Scarcity of qualified and motivated faculty is a common problem. To enhance the quality of education in engineering colleges, an innovative Certificate in Information Technology (CIT) program was started by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) and IIIT-Hyderabad (International Institute of Information Technology). EnhanceEdu, a division of IIIT-H, has worked with over 50 engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh, India, and trained their faculty on a variety of technical and non-technical subjects. This paper shares the results of a study where two groups of teachers were given mentor-assisted 2-day workshops on "Art of Teaching" in two separate sessions, where the master trainer used personalization techniques with one group and not with the other. Teachers were expected to collaborate, create online lessons and present to the participants of the workshop. Enhanced collaboration between members, reduced time for creation of lessons, in-depth content and improved design of assessment questions were observed with the lessons created by the group where learning was personalized.