Saturday, October 17, 2009

Helping the Talent Pool of Moffusil India

I am reproducing below an interesting mail received from Prof Subbiah Arunachalam, forwarding an article, "MAKING A DIFFERENCE: Sunday Trek To The Golden Gate" (He gives up his weekends to help his kindred folk: the vast scientific talent pool of mofussil India) by S. Anand that appeared in Outlook, 20 December 2004.

Friends:

Prof. G Rajasekaran of Matscience alerted me to this short write-up which appeared five years ago in Outlook*. I do not know if Dr Satyanarayana's Sunday classes continue to this day, but I will find it out. But he has provided a good model. Resaerch scientists and university professors in small towns like Karaikudi and Rourkela can follow this model and help motivated students get into research. Fortunately now many open educational resources are available free on the Internet, iTunes and YouTube, e.g. the NPTEL courses offered by IITs and IISc, the Open University, UK, courses, the MIT (USA) courses and several others. An organization called ISKME (Half Moon Bay, California) has a directory of open educational resources.

Best wishes.

Subbiah Arunachalam

* May be available in the archives of OUTLOOK.

** Contact address of Prof Satyanarayana as given in the above Outlook article:
233, Off Central Avenue, DAE Township, Kalpakkam, Tamil Nadu—603102.
Tel: 094443-46247.
Email: svmsatya@yahoo.co.uk

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