70% of international engineering students in US from India, China

Seventy per cent of international students studying engineering in the US are from China and India, according to a new report. 

"SEVIS by the Numbers," a quarterly report of international students studying in the US, was released yesterday by the student and exchange visitor program (SEVP), part of the US immigration and customs enforcement's (ICE) homeland security investigations (HSI). 

As of July 8, 9,66,333 international students were enrolled in nearly 9,000 US schools using an F (academic) or M (vocational) visa. 

This marks a nearly five per cent decrease from April, primarily due to graduation rates, but an eight percent increase when compared to July 2013. 

The July report included a special section that focuses on China. 

According to it, seventy-five percent of all international students were from Asia, with 28 per cent from China. 

As of July 8, there were 2,70,596 international students from China studying in the US. The majority of these students studied in California, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Illinois. 

The report further said that nearly 3,50,000 international students pursued STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) coursework in July. 

Sixty-nine per cent of international students studying STEM fields were male. Eighty-five per cent of international students studying STEM coursework are from Asia. 

Seventy per cent of international students studying engineering are from China and India. More international students study engineering than any other STEM field of study, it said. 

South Korea and Vietnam had the greatest percentage decrease in students studying in the US at eight per cent and seven per cent, respectively, when compared to April figures. 

The top 10 countries of citizenship for international students included: China, India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Mexico and Brazil. 

The University of Southern California, Purdue University, the University of Illinois, New York University and Columbia University rank one through five among US schools with the most international students. 

The report is based on data from the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), a web-based system that includes information on international students, exchange visitors and their dependents while they are in the US. 

A school must be SEVP-certified before it can enroll international students. 

SEVP monitors approximately one million international students pursuing academic or vocational studies (F and M visa holders) in the US and their dependents. It also certifies schools and programmes that enroll these students.

Original source : http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/education/news/70-of-international-engineering-students-in-US-from-India-China-Report/articleshow/39737684.cms

Boring lectures in classrooms cause more failures, lesser grades

Classroom lectures cause more students to fail compared to interactive sessions involving discussions and problem solving in science, engineering and math courses, a new study in the US has found. Interactive sessions, also called 'active learning', improve exam performance too.

Those findings are from the largest and most comprehensive analysis ever published of studies comparing lecturing to active learning in undergraduate education, said Scott Freeman, a University of Washington principal lecturer in biology. He's lead author of a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of May 12.

Freeman and his co-authors based their findings on 225 studies of undergraduate education across all of the "STEM" areas: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The researchers found that 55 per cent more students fail lecture-based courses than classes with at least some active learning.

On average across all the studies, a little more than one-third of students in traditional lecture classes failed — that is, they either withdrew or got Fs or Ds, which generally means they were ineligible to take more advanced courses. On average, with active learning, a little more than one-fifth of students failed.

"If you have a course with 100 students signed up, about 34 fail if they get lectured to but only 22 fail if they do active learning, according to our analysis," Freeman said. "There are hundreds of thousands of students taking STEM courses in U.S. colleges every year, so we're talking about tens of thousands of students who could stay in STEM majors instead of flunking out every year."

Attempts by college faculty to use active learning, long popular in K-12 classrooms, started taking off in the mid-1990s, Freeman said, though lecturing still dominates.

"We've got to stop killing student performance and interest in science by lecturing and instead help them think like scientists," he said.

Regarding grade improvement, the findings showed improvements on exams increased an average of 6 per cent, which might raise students half a grade, for example from a B+ to an A.

If the failure rates of 34 per cent for lecturing and 22 per cent in classes with some active learning were applied to the 7 million US undergraduates who say they want to pursue STEM majors, some 2.38 million students would fail lecture-style courses vs 1.54 million with active learning. That's 840,000 additional students failing under lecturing, a difference of 55 percent compared to the failure rate of active learning.

original source : Times of India 

How technology is set to transform India's fragmented education system

In 2012, engineer Raghav Gajula moved to an east Delhi slum to work as a teacher at a private school for low-income families. Most of his students’ parents are labourers in local factories but have paid 300 Indian rupees a month, about £3, for their kids to attend a school with busy staff and no computer resources. Gajula, who found the teaching position through a Teach For India fellowship, spotted an opportunity. He lent the kids his laptop and started setting up mentoring sessions for them with his friends, via Skype.

Many of the slum kids come from the Bhagwanpur Khera neighborhood where one of the main landmarks is a toxic sewage drain. Yet Gajula's idea meant they were soon scheduling their own Skype sessions with their mentors, and talking about their ambitions in the arts and sports. Gajula now works with two activists on setting up a local after-school centre with the aim of expanding the mentoring programme. They have 25 students and five donated laptops, though they aren’t sure how the nonprofit centre is going to survive financially.

Gajula’s innovation could be transformative for India's fragmented education system, but there is no overarching strategy for how to incorporate these kinds of projects into the sprawling Indian school system. According to government estimates, there are about 254 million pupils in primary and secondary schools both in the private and public sector, but there’s no overall technology policy for schools. Internet penetration is around 12%, and average connection speeds are slow.

Schools aren't using equipment

Recognising the increasing importance of technology in education and employment, the Indian government has a scheme that grants every public school district, regardless of the number of schools it contains, of Rs. 5m [£49,700] every year to invest in educational technology. Districts have to submit a proposal in order to be granted the funds. The government estimates that 22% of primary schools have a computer, but the reality is that many schools aren't using the equipment they have.

“Of the schools I visited, maybe 10% of the computers were working,” says Swati Sahni, a consultant who worked for the Indian government on education from 2010 to 2012. Five of Gajula’s students at a local government school know their school has a computer centre, but none of them can remember using it.

In India's booming private education sector, technology is being adopted much more quickly. As many as 400 educational technology firms have launched in the past 10 years, yet the quality and longevity of their products is far from uniform.

In August 2013, India’s most prominent educational technology company, Educomp Solutions, laid off 3,500 workers. Educomp had done a great job selling digital learning materials and a multimedia whiteboard to as many as 14,500 schools, according to a company brochure. But some schools were unsure what to do with the technology, and critics say the firm failed to train teachers to use the equipment. Some cancelled orders, and in other schools the equipment went unused, according to an investigation by Forbes India. The company’s value dropped by nearly two-thirds between May 2013 and April 2014.

Personalised educational content

“Now, the customer is very sceptical,” says Neil D’Souza, founder and CEO of Zaya Learning Labs, a three-year-old ed tech company based in Mumbai. “You have many schools which have bought solutions or been donated solutions which don’t add any value to their learning.” Zaya has 15 in-school learning labs, where students share tablets and computers that stream personalised educational content.

Companies has previously focused on delivering services to India's high-end private schools, says D’Souza, where teachers were more technologically literate and where the revenue model was proven. But Zaya focuses on the growing number of low-income private schools, where many teachers aren’t regular technology users. “The teacher is the key person to deliver,” says D’Souza, who says Zaya offers teaching assistants and spends hours on training.

But Zaya faces challenges when it comes to profits. Affordable private schools charge fees between Rs. 300 and 1,500 [£3-£15] per student per month. In order for an ed tech solution to be viable in this space, it should ideally be priced at less than Rs. 50 [50p] per student per month, says Shabnam Aggarwal, founder of the ed tech advisory Perspectful. She says that’s a very difficult target for most companies to meet.

Educational philanthropies and nonprofits may be able to provide a bridge, finding ways to make technology interventions affordable and scalable for lower-income students. One such philanthropy is the Central Square Foundation (CSF). It has been developing a library of free and open-source educational content in Indian languages, something that founder and CEO Ashish Dhawan says private companies have little incentive to do.

A product for the low-income segment

A former private equity investor, Dhawan says India is now at an inflection point with educational technology, as internet and hardware penetration are set to explode in the next few years. Inspired by this belief, CSF has also invested money and time in trying to find revenue models for ed tech in the low-income space. “We thought: why don’t we give a grant to create a product for the low-income segment?” says Dhawan.

A year and a half ago, CSF tied up with MindSpark, a company that already provides adaptive learning tools in elite private schools, to test the company’s software on low-income and government school students. The students come to the centres for an hour a day, six days a week, to learn Hindi, maths and English. They spend half their time working with a personalised adaptive computer program, and half working with a teacher.

When the pilot started, the students were about two years behind their age group, says Dhawan. Although they’ve now improved, it’s still a struggle to get them to the point where they’ll perform well on tests. Dropouts are common and the pilot still hasn’t proven a revenue model, Dhawan says. The parents, who pay 200 to 250 [£2-£2.50] hard-earned rupees a month for the program, want results in grades, viewing education as a path out of a life of hard manual labour for their children.

But for the students, technology offers a window on a different world. The students in Gajula’s class type messages and paint pictures, dreaming of the day they will start using the internet. Twelve-year-old Parsunath Sahoo describes his father's long days working in a factory that makes pots and pans, but Parsunath dreams of joining the police. “On the internet, you can do anything,” he says.

original source : http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/07/technology-transform-india-education-system