IIT Bombay to teach all classes online for the rest of 2020

NEW DELHI: With the country witnessing a spike in COVID-19 cases every day, the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, or IIT Bombay, has decided to conduct all classes online for the rest of the year, said the director of the Institute, Subhasis Chaudhuri in a Facebook post late on Wednesday night.

The details of the extensive online classes will be shared with students in due course of time.

“After a long deliberation in the Senate, we have decided today that the next semester will be run purely in the online mode so that there is no compromise on the safety and well-being of the students”, Chaudhuri wrote in the post.

Chaudhuri in his post has further appealed for donations to help economically deprived students of IIT Bombay.

“However, a large section of our students come from economically less privileged families and would require a helping hand to equip them with the IT hardware (i.e. laptops and broadband connectivity ) to take these online classes,” the post read.

An estimated Rs 5 crores is presently required to help the needy students. While the alumni have committed a good amount, but further support is required, the post read, “I solicit through this message your donations, however small it may be.”

Engineering Online

The Punjab Engineering College Chandigarh, or PECC, was the first to announce it will hold its first semester of the next academic year online. “More than a month ago, we had felt that opening the campus with all 3,300 students would not be possible till November, and we must plan for an online semester,” its director, Dheeraj Sanghi, had written in his blog post.

The IITs have been strategizing the salvage academic work for the next semester among the coronavirus outbreak. On June 11, the Standing Committee of the IIT Council appointed a committee to draw up a “minimum common strategy” for after COVID-19. The committee, led by the IIT Delhi director, V Ramgopal Rao, suggested online teaching for a host of postgraduate courses, starting the next session in December or January 2021 and reducing the course duration of certain postgraduate programmes. It even suggested allowing a “semester or year drop option with no pre-conditions”.

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