Butterfly Model: An Innovative Way to Deliver and Personalize Content in the "Learning by Doing" Methodology

An explosion of educational institutes in India has caused a dearth of experienced faculty for teaching. The employability of graduating engineering students is low, owing perhaps to their weak training. To help overcome this problem, an innovative Certificate in Information Technology (CIT) program was started. Through this program, faculty members of engineering colleges are trained who then are expected to train the students at their colleges. We have worked with over 40 engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh, trained their faculty and have begun implementing this program for the students through the faculty at their respective colleges. Our experience and learning from this approach has had good results. They have also shown that personalization for the benefit of the learner needs to be given a higher emphasis. This has led to content development in the "Butterfly Model" with the "Learning by Doing" methodology at its foundation. This paper discusses in detail the basis for our selecting this model and about our initial studies and feedback received for three courses developed in this model. The feedback for this model is encouraging and we expect to develop more courses in this model in the future. This model will be applicable to a wide range of learners and will help in enhancing the quality of learning of the graduates.