An avid learner, teacher, and researcher having 21 years of work experience, Prof Vinod Patidar is currently the Professor and Dean Research at SPSU, Udaipur. He has published more than 80 research papers in international journals of repute and conference proceedings, including four of his research papers in the Sciencedirect top 25 lists of most downloaded articles published in the respective journals during various periods. He has been awarded various research fellowships/grants/awards and has mobilized around INR 5 Million for various research-related activities as well.

SPSU

What are your roles and responsibilities towards the students?

“Mentoring them to get into the University pattern”

A role of a teacher is not restricted to the courses being taught by him/her. He/She plays a vital role in students’ life as a mentor and educator. When a student gets admitted into the college or University, he/she first interacts with the teachers of the fraternity. Therefore, their role becomes important in guiding and mentoring the students for their studies in making them aware of the new pattern of studies in University under a different model of education. Here the students are required themselves to get into self-study, active learning, project-based learning habits also along with the traditional passive learning methods.

How do you establish healthy relations with your students and fellow faculty?

“Clear communication, guidance and involvement”

Our interactions with the students primarily within the classroom and outside the classroom remain focused on optimized learning. In addition to the classroom lecturing, I provide them mentoring on how they should proceed in their education, what are various upcoming fields related to their programme of study and how they may prepare themselves to work in such areas. In addition to these, I discuss with them how they should project themselves as a good human being, what are the social roles a student may play within an outside campus as being a responsible citizen. Overall, my emphasis remains to ensure optimized learning along with good human values. I always talk and guide my fellow faculty members, motivate them to involve themselves in high priority academic activities like consistent research efforts, consultancy activities along with their primary duties of teaching. I am involved with them in all academic discussion, discussions related to the vision and mission of the department, short term and long term action plan of the university in sync with the University’s vision and mission. We together also strategize on the teaching learning methodology to be adopted which includes the latest technologies and tools and ensure the best learning environment for the students. I am also involved in their personal issues related to campus life or any other difficulty being faced by them to make a cordial and socially connected healthy working environment.

How do you try to bring in a practical approach towards subjects?

“Research-oriented and dynamic classroom learning”

The subjects taught by me are mainly on fundamental and basic level courses. However, being a very active researcher in the field of applied areas like cryptography and image encryption and application of chaos theory, I used to bring my overall experience of research in the classroom and motivate the students to take up more research and development activities. I also teach some of the advanced open elective courses like quantum information processing, nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory wherein I put more emphasis on the project-based learning and applications of these emerging areas in present day technological developments. We involve students in projects and our research activities to give them a training and feeling of how to execute a project as a team and within stipulated time.

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How do you strategize the curriculum and make it befitting for the students?

“Analysing, observing and implementing best practices”

We have a very open approach to develop the curriculum. We mainly focus on the learning part of the student, how much he should learn and what are the based methods for optimized learning. Along with this, we take opinions from the core engineering departments, what are the prerequisites in their core courses from the subjects being taught by us. We also take regular feedback from the students and improvise our teaching strategy based on the outcome analysis of courses taught to previous batches. Including above all factors, we have discussions at the faculty, department and university level and incorporate the changes in the curriculum.

How do you help your student to cope up with the competition being so high?

“Mentoring and training with a global scenario”

Along with maintaining the learning curve of students, we as teachers and institutes need to give them enough training on the current trends in the technological world and prepare them in advance to face those challenges when they are out in the field. We provide them enough opportunity to expose them to such rapid developments happening in their core areas through lectures from industry and leading experts from academics, give them the opportunity to work in collaboration with the faculty members in their ongoing research and consultancy activities etc. The main emphasis is on self-learning, activity-based learning and project-based learning. 

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What valuable advice would you like to give to the students?

“Improve your learning curve”

Students should extract as much as possible from their teachers and mentors while they are in university. You will never have the same opportunity in life again. They must focus on gaining contemporary technological knowledge rather than simply focusing on grabbing a job immediately. Keep yourself updated with the current happenings in the world to anticipate the forthcoming opportunities and prepare yourself accordingly.