Dr D Rosy Salomi Victoria
For many, becoming a teacher marks the moment when one moves from being taught to becoming the one who teaches. For Dr. Rosy Salomi Victoria, that line has never been distinct.
After 35 years in academia, she remains a student in her own right – curious, persistent and willing to revisit subjects she has yet to explore. Her days may be spent teaching others, but her own learning continues long after the classroom falls quiet.
This desire to learn beyond her curriculum brought her to NPTEL in 2018, and the same curiosity continues to draw her to new courses.
At the time, NPTEL was simply another avenue through which she could explore technology beyond what her regular academic responsibilities demanded. Her first course, ‘Introduction to Programming in C’, marked the beginning of a long-term engagement with online learning.Over the years, she explored an expanding range of subjects – from Programming and Cloud computing to Machine Learning, Computer Networks, IoT and Data Analytics. Teaching, research, mentoring students and academic responsibilities filled her days. NPTEL lectures often found their place at night, after the day’s work was done. New concepts were not always easy to absorb, especially while balancing them with her professional responsibilities. Still, she kept returning to the lectures, completing assignments and working through unfamiliar ideas.
Her silent persistence showed in loud results. She has completed 12 NPTEL courses and earned top 2% recognition in both Computer Networks, Internet Protocol and Introduction to Internet of Things. She earned Elite + Silver in the former and Elite + Gold certifications in the latter respectively. Her commitment to learning within a discipline also earned her the NPTEL Discipline Star recognition.
NPTEL courses have strengthened her ability to learn independently. She speaks of gaining technical knowledge across several areas but also of developing discipline, time management and confidence along the way. As the NPTEL SPOC for her department, Dr. Rosy encourages her students to make use of the same opportunity. She motivates them to enroll, keep up with their weekly assignments and prepare seriously for the examinations. Her department also conducts mock tests to help students assess their readiness.In this way, her engagement with NPTEL has extended beyond personal development. What began as a personal decision to explore subjects outside her curriculum has become part of the learning culture she helps foster among her students.
For her, knowledge matters most when it travels beyond the page or screen. Her professional work reflects this emphasis on application: her academic interests span AI, Computer Networks, Machine Learning and Data Analytics, with a focus on applying theoretical knowledge to practical problems. Alongside her teaching and research, she has contributed through research publications, textbooks and patents.
Even after completing several courses and earning recognition for her performance, she has not treated those achievements as an endpoint. This is what makes her journey worth remembering. The goal is retaining the humility to sit down and learn something unfamiliar, even after spending decades teaching others.
For Dr. Rosy, learning has never needed a finish line. There is always another question to ask, an idea to explore and another subject waiting to be understood. And perhaps that is the simplest definition of a life devoted to learning: to keep moving forward, knowing that there will always be more to discover.
~written by Shambhavi Shekhar