PES University is one of the leaders in the field of teaching and research. It is focused to furnishing "education for the real world" to inspire students to reach beyond their potential. Since inception, PES University has been able to make the students adapt intellectual thoughts and technological mind frame by the cumulative and enormous efforts of the management, professors and staff.
Though not a foreign concept, peer to peer (P2P) learning is relatively new to the education system. Our western counterparts have been familiarized with the concept of tutoring system all through their secondary education and undergraduate degree but very few have adopted this method as a technique, a learning platform.
The prospect of this method though has a lot of scopes, for the peer to peer system, though a longer and more in-depth process, involves formal and informal learning through online and offline methods, mainly driven by the student's inclination to learn, master and teach the subject in return, completing the cycle.
To step out of the conventional Indian university system and explore with this approach, the PES University in Bangalore created a unit called PESU I/O, to see the response it has with the Indian demographic. They targeted the 1st years of the college, as an after-school elective co-curricular, to see how they would receive a new system alongside their syllabus, and much to the trust's surprise, a massive number of 900+ of the existing 1350 first-year students applied to enroll for these sessions, of which, a selection had been assigned to 15 different courses pertaining to co-curricular or extracurricular skill development, for the pilot batch. Moreover, over the last two years, the conclusion we have come to, concerning the first and second years was that:
1. By opting for this method of learning, the students (who are entering from high school to their respective undergrad courses), were provided a new platform to find people of similar interests, for future collaborations in projects and research.
2. This initiative aims to help students evolve from the proclivity that pre-university has induced in them, in a fluent manner, also familiarizing them with the attributes of corporate work life, easing them into the concept.
3. As the sources of content is a senior in college, they are also in a capacity to relate better and understand quicker.
The coherent methods of the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) are associated with weekly resource sharing on the college forum; all one would need to learn the concepts, followed by weekly discussions and task submissions. This helps the SMEs keep a tab on their students' progress and give them undivided attention with respect to any individual problems they might encounter. Towards the last week of the course, the students were expected to present the summarized version of the program that they undertook. By the end of the month-long program, the students would have acquired a new skill in the most practical manner or developed a better command over the skill.
However, the highlight of this entire complex, elaborate and well-planned layout is that all of this is done by a diligent and committed set of students both management and tutors, who put in long hours to create and evaluate the content taught and perceived. This helped the college cater to the requirements of the program, for the capacity to understand and solve the glitches in the system becomes the community's initiative.
