Dr Tirumala Ramashri
By the time Dr. Tirumala Ramashri reaches home, it is past eight. She sets off for Sri Venkateswara University College of Engineering at seven-thirty in the morning and drives forty kilometres home. She sits down right away to revise. She had already taken eight NPTEL exams that semester, and between the commute, the warden duties, and the committee hearings, she had found the time she needed.
Dr. T. Ramashri has been a professor of Electronics and Communication Engineering at SVUCE, Tirupati, since 1992. She holds several administrative roles, oversees the warden operations for 2,200 students, and chairs the committee against sexual harassment. By any measure, her calendar is full. And yet, since 2020, she has completed over 55 NPTEL courses, earned four domain certifications with two more in progress, and collected enough NPTEL stars – Discipline Star, Motivated Learner, Believer, Enthusiast, and Evangelist – that she eventually stopped counting.
NPTEL entered her life in January 2020, during an MHRD Leadership for Academicians Programme at IISER Kolkata. There she met Dr. Sugandhi from Mahindra College of Engineering, who had already been on the platform since 2018. Their conversations during those sessions left an impression. She had heard of NPTEL before but had never focused on it. This time she did, drawn first to patents and to subjects well outside her regular ECE syllabus. But the push that made her actually sit down and register came, unexpectedly, from a student.
Some students in her class had failed the required NPTEL exams. She told them plainly that it was avoidable, that the professors taught well, and there was no excuse. One student turned it back on her: “You write and see, ma’am. Then you will come to know.” She accepted the challenge.
She registered, took the exam, and never really stopped.
The studying, it turned out, was changing how she taught. The Cybersecurity domain on NPTEL included a course on Operating Systems, one she would never have studied as an ECE professor. It was there that she saw, for the first time, how internet protocols actually behave at the system level, underneath the network layer she had been teaching for years. Voice and Data Networks, a course she has taught four or five times now, does not feel the same anymore. “The way I teach has become entirely different, and that I can say because of NPTEL,” she says.
Last year, when she was recognised for the State Best Teacher Award, she included NPTEL into the key points of her submission, highlighting how she had expanded her knowledge beyond her regular syllabus. In the interview room, a vice-chancellor asked whether it was true, whether a university professor had genuinely done all of it. Dr. Ramashri told him she had.
Looking ahead, she hopes not only to earn the remaining NPTEL Stars but one day contribute as an NPTEL course instructor herself.
The moment she returns to most, though, is smaller than any award room. A student, twenty years old, walked in one day to show her a completed VLSI domain certificate. He said she was the reason he had done it. Dr. Ramashri stood up, clapped, and shook his hand. Then she told him she would have sat beside him the whole time if he had only asked.
A student had once challenged her to write and see. She did. Now they come to show her what they have done.
~written by Nehansh Kesharwani