Anna University Faculty Crisis: Split Teaching and Guest Lecturer Reliance Worry Engineering Batches

In the Civil, Mechanical, Electrical, CS & ECE, BTech departments, students at Anna University, Chennai, are getting divided teaching with the absence of faculty members and too much dependence on guest lecturers.

Engineering programs are structured in a way to be a system, with subjects sequentially dependent upon each other. Thermodynamics is the subject area that can be used to introduce mechanical engineering into fluid mechanics and machine design. 

The process moves from strength of materials to structural design, with environmental conditions determining the process of execution. The course covers electronics from simple circuits to integrated circuits for two semesters. Pupils highlight that if a topic is not explicitly taught, it affects the rest of the curriculum, and they state that continuity and consistency are important for subjects that are linked.

Limitations of Guest Lecturing 

Courses are no longer supported by a single faculty member but divided between a few teaching posts that are given to various teachers, frequently guest lecturers. Guest teachers keep teaching without interruption but mostly do not take part in the evaluation process or laboratory work or give long-term mentoring. Students should now have to connect the previous and future topics, taking responsibility for the integration.

How is Project Work Affected? 

Project work involves a great deal of ongoing academic support, since ideas developed over the course of several months from the proposal to the actual implementation. Continuity is lost when different faculty are leading students at different junctures. 

For civil engineering structural projects, it is important that the calculations of loads as well as the behavior of materials are not done wrong, or the whole design could be affected, and therefore it is essential that guidance is given throughout. Research scholars too report receiving such fragmented guidance that they seek inputs from various faculty members to solve various aspects of the problem, but not for further refining the problem.