Diversification in engineering education through Indian Student Forum: An experimentation project in India

Diversity in education incorporates varying geographic, cultural, intellectual, ethnic, academic and social elements. An education that would cover this diversification will make the world a more vibrant place to live. India is a country known for its diversified culture, languages, ethnic groups and more importantly its education. There are two interesting questions that foster the discussion for an enhanced engineering education in the country. They are: (1.) what would be the potential, if the numerously diversified engineering minds around the nation are brought together? And (2.) How can this be driven in the right direction? A group of engineering students across the nation are working to find the answers to these questions. This paper discusses the efforts and outcomes of these students´ initiatives in creating diversity programs and their motto to unify the student´s minds. SPEED (Student Platform for Engineering Education Development) is an international non-profit student organization that works towards enhancing engineering education. SPEED-India is a country chapter that has conducted five regional workshops and one national conference (Indian Student Forum) between June 2013 and January 2014. These sessions have brought together engineering students from across the country and the world to discuss and develop action plans that would result in an enhanced engineering education. Through these working sessions, more than 3000 Indian engineering students were brought together and exposed to the discussions of engineering education. They were later made to contribute to the dialogues and as well as in developing concrete action plans. The action plans were diversified from addressing the infrastructure for engineering education to technology uses in learning to community, project and entrepreneurship based learning methodologies. The paper discusses the creation and outcomes of these action plans in detail.