AUTONOMY IN HIGHER EDUCATION

In this paper, it is pointed out that from the time immemorial man is searching ways and means for autonomy, maybe in such matters as spiritual, political, social reformation, discoveries, invention, etc. Autonomy in education is expected to achieve autonomy in other areas of real-life, worldly affairs. In India, the buzz word since the last two decades is autonomy in higher education. We have several models in higher education found and established in Post Graduate (PG) programmes of University, Indian Institute of Technology ( IIT) or Indian Institute of Management ( IIM). These institutions one-way or the other imbibe some elements of autonomy in education. A brief literature review presents some concepts of autonomy and their scope of implementation as perceived worldwide. It is pointed out that the concept of autonomy is being tried out since many decades and researchers have made some proposals to have a better perception of autonomy. An overview of autonomy in higher education in India is presented, as viewed either by UGC or Vice-Chancellors. The author has proposed that a teacher (referred to as a roaming university) is the first link in education chain to be autonomous in a real sense followed by autonomy at such levels as university/institution, management, regulatory bodies, and then at the national level. The author has made some suggestions for each level for inculcating autonomy. For instance, some suggestions are clear national policy, least regulations, reformulation of laws, autonomous management, autonomous institutions awarding degrees, five years teacher’s tenure, lean system, etc. The article will be of interest to all autonomous personnel concerned

TRANSFORMATION FOR EXCELLENCE: ROLE OF ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP IN BUILDING UNIVERSITY THROUGH BEST-IN-PRACTICES

In this paper, it is argued that the university is the pace-setter for the present and future generations. University is like corporate, Vice-Chancellor CEO, campus the shop floor solving present and would-be future issues faced by the community. VC being the peak of intellectuals is expected to work as a lighthouse for the society. The call for the 21st Century is presented and the VC’s role is enunciated specifying certain competencies, traits and skills so that the goals set for the 21st Century education can be met leading to a quality life for people, their well-fare and well-being with sustainability for education and national economic development.. It is believed that the article will be of interest to all concerned

Machine-Part cell formation through visual decipherable clustering of Self Organizing Map

Machine-part cell formation is used in cellular manufacturing in order to process a large variety, quality, lower work in process levels, reducing manufacturing lead-time and customer response time while retaining flexibility for new products. This paper presents a new and novel approach for obtaining machine cells and part families. In the cellular manufacturing the fundamental problem is the formation of part families and machine cells. The present paper deals with the Self Organising Map (SOM) method an unsupervised learning algorithm in Artificial Intelligence, and has been used as a visually decipherable clustering tool of machine-part cell formation. The objective of the paper is to cluster the binary machine-part matrix through visually decipherable cluster of SOM color-coding and labelling via the SOM map nodes in such a way that the part families are processed in that machine cells. The Umatrix, component plane, principal component projection, scatter plot and histogram of SOM have been reported in the present work for the successful visualization of the machine-part cell formation. Computational result with the proposed algorithm on a set of group technology problems available in the literature is also presented. The proposed SOM approach produced solutions with a grouping efficacy that is at least as good as any results earlier reported in the literature and improved the grouping efficacy for 70% of the problems and found immensely useful to both industry practitioners and researchers.Comment: 18 pages,3 table, 4 figure