MUMBAI: In a first, the Indian Institutes of Technology will begin opening their classrooms to one another from this academic year.Students will be allowed to take select courses at other IIT campuses and even spend a term away from their parent institute, marking the first formal academic exchange within the IIT system. Insiders said the move quietly loosens the rigidity of the JEE-run system, where a single rank has long determined not just entry into an IIT but the boundaries of a student’s academic experience for 4 or more years thereafter.“We are mapping curricula across multiple programmes in various IITs,” said IIT Madras director Padma Shri V Kamakoti. “Once that is matched, our students from IIT Madras can spend a term in another IIT or a student from IIT Kanpur or Delhi or Indore can come to the Madras campus to study some courses and earn credits which we will transfer to the home institute.”For years, universities across the world have been collaborating through joint degrees and shared classrooms. However, India’s most prestigious technical institutions have largely watched this trend from the sidelines.Structured’ system to ease pan-IIT mobilityWe recently had meeting of academic deans from all IITs, organised by IIT Madras,” said Prof Prathap Haridoss, dean (academics), IITM. “Among several issues discussed, one important topic was credit transfer and student mobility across IITs.”To date, as Prof Haridoss explained, “One major reason large-scale transfers have not been permitted is the issue of rank integrity: students were originally allotted seats based on rank-specific constraints, and allowing arbitrary transfers could violate that framework.”However, plan to allow student movement was discussed in IIT Council and decision taken to seek approval from respective senates of individual IITs.This will convert campuses operating parallely into a network that allows the students to move between institutes. “There is growing recognition that students increasingly move across locations for internships, training, and other academic or professional engagements,” said Prof Haridoss. In such cases, it would be useful to allow students from one IIT to take courses at another IIT during the same period.The IITs are therefore working towards creating a “structured mechanism” for semester-based mobility among campuses, where students can spend a term at another IIT, earn credits there, and have those credits transferred back; “similar to how semester exchange programmes currently operate with foreign universities”. “This would initially be implemented in a limited, controlled manner,” Prof Haridoss added.Each IIT would decide how many visiting students it can host at any given point in time, based on their infrastructure and capacity constraints.
