Dr Ikkurthi Rama Koteswara Rao
This century of ours is never still: people, thoughts, and things keep shifting from one place to another in the blink of an eye. Living in a world where mobility matters, Mr. Ikkurthi Rama Koteswara Rao also set sail through NPTEL, navigating domains, knowledge, and different paths life opened up to him, as a result.
An Associate Professor at the department of Electronics and Communication Engineering in Prakasam Engineering College, Andhra Pradesh, Mr. Rao has passionately pursued a migration to a somewhat foreign land: Computer Science and Engineering. Aided by NPTEL, he completed 15 courses in the span of two years, earning him the title of Domain Scholar in Computer Science. During this period, he encountered multiple topics ranging from Cryptography, Network Security, and Cloud Computing to Blockchain and its applications, Computer Graphics and much more. He recalled these subjects vividly, for they made his learning experience a memorable one.
Mr. Rao was particularly impressed by the practical aspects, all the courses he had taken up, touched upon. He recommends all his students to consider the platform as a means of learning beyond the classroom, as one has to keep up with the world. And he confesses, he has spectacularly succeeded in doing so, inspired by a student!
A challenge from a student to take up an NPTEL course led this beloved and popular educator to begin again – as a learner himself. It was another migration Mr. Rao went through, so as to keep up with the world around him. He repeatedly mentioned his students to be his greatest source of inspiration: a very humbling, yet beautiful claim, on the part of an educator.
Now, he returns to the same students, with multiple suggestions for helpful courses they can take up. He finds the Q&A sessions to be particularly useful, so as to help steer away doubts and encourage interaction, even across the blinking screen. He confesses that the courses won’t always be easy: one of the most challenging courses he had taken till date was ‘Ethical Hacking’, yet it also turned out to be one of his favourites.
And it was through such challenges that he experienced growth in skills beyond the boundaries of one’s discipline.
In his two years and 15 courses, Mr. Rao thus acquired better problem-solving, time-management, and articulation skills.
He believes his students too shall have a chance to gain these invaluable abilities, encouraging them to take up multiple courses at a time on NPTEL. He highlighted the platform’s delivery of content through experts from eminent institutions, which led to deeper and more practically-oriented coverage than the standard college syllabi. Tools which remain unavailable to multiple colleges across the country are employed in teaching the learners whatever they wished to learn, whenever they wished to learn it. NPTEL therefore moves you out of the limitations of your classroom as well, and keeps you from stagnating.
Mr. Rao happily embraced the opportunity to keep moving which this world presents to us, with the hand NPTEL offered. He wishes the people around too would walk with him, eventually.
~written by Eshani Bhattacharjee
