IIT-Delhi revises curriculum after over a decade
Amid the changing demands of the industry and burden on students, the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT-Delhi), has revised the curriculum of its undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD programmes after more than a decade.
The new curriculum will be implemented from the academic year 2025-26. The curriculum was last revised in 2013. The task to revise the curriculum was taken up in 2022.
During the curriculum review, extensive feedback was taken from various stakeholders — thousands of students, alumni and industry experts. Each department also obtained further feedback from hundreds of stakeholders to frame the finer aspects.
In line with the needs of the modern world, the main themes of the revised undergraduate curriculum are flexibility, a deep focus on hands-on learning, emphasis on environment and sustainability, creative expression, ethical reasoning and emerging trends in technology such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Prof Rangan Banerjee, Director, IIT-Delhi, said, “We have reviewed and revamped our curriculum to make our graduates future-ready.”
The revised undergraduate programme allows for choices in general engineering, basic sciences and humanities courses. Further opportunities for pursuing a minor degree or specialisation in a variety of areas have been incorporated.
An honours programme has been introduced as an add-on to the BTech degree. Additionally, an undergraduate student can now petition for an MTech degree in any available master’s programme here at the end of third year, allowing a student to graduate with both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in five years.
Besides, modules related to environment, sustainability, creative expression and ethical reasoning have been built into many courses to ready young engineers for current global challenges.
Acknowledging students’ feedback, the institute has decided that the candidates joining it through JEE (Advanced) will be able to continue to change their programme, based on their merit, at the end of first year.
“Laboratory and tutorial components in most departmental courses allow students to engage with faculty in a deep and meaningful manner. Besides, all first-year courses are now mandated to have small class sizes,” read a statement issued by IIT-Delhi.
AI-based code generators have been integrated into the introductory course on programming. Students will be taught how to use AI responsibly to write better programmes for more complex problems in less time. This will future proof the graduates across disciplines by nurturing them in the mode of programming that is taking over the world.
“The new MTech or MS (Research) curriculum emphasises on industry connect and project-based learning. Two mandatory components — capstone project emphasising problem-solving through teamwork and a summer internship emphasising external-connect — will make our students industry-ready. Flexibility is built into the revised curriculum, allowing students to explore courses outside their core academic unit,” the institute said.
India