Prof Anil Gupta's ideas on pushing the frontier of education

I had blogged earlier about Prof Anil Gupta's innovative approach(http://iimaexperiences.blogspot.com/2011/10/prof-anil-gupta.html). As his electives on intellectual property and sustainable agriculture draw to and end, his approach is even more in evidence. For example

• Crowdsourcing of exams:-He invited 3 questions from each student, stating that he may modify and ask these good questions in the exams. He said that since his purpose was to increase the learning(not to assign a letter grade), he would be more than happy 
• Focus on learning by doing:-He gives higher grades for projects/reports which can be built into something rather than gather dust somewhere. For example, studying local waste management or making a small change locally, is valued highly by him.  
• Building on ideas built earlier:-He lamented that there was no repository of projects, and that each batch may end up reinventing the wheel without making any institutional progress towards knowledge. And to counter the concern of copying, he said that peer pressure/fear of being called out in public would stop people from copying, and also ensure that the topics are reasonably original. Actually, this is quite an obvious idea, but not done so far anywhere. He suggests having it on the intranet, and later on the internet for all and sundry. 
• Feedback on projects:-He uploads the project proposals on the blog, and gives credit for students giving useful projects on each other's projects.
• Student presentations given importance to:Despite his huge intellectual stature, he pays deep attention to student presentations and is free with compliments and suggestions. And to ensure that others pay attention to that, he sets questions based on the class presentations etc. 
• No attendance sheet:-This is rare, but his logic seems(he has not explained it explicitly) is that since the outputs are graded(report, presentation), monitoring inputs are not that essential.