IIT Kharagpur “does not have the infrastructure to run hybrid classes” and classes will continue to be held online till most of the students are recalled, said an IIT official.
The possibility of holding classes on hybrid mode — allowing some students to attend the lectures in person, while the others will have the sessions live-streamed to them — was taken up at a meeting of the special senate held last Friday.
An official present at the meeting said it was resolved that arranging tech support for live streaming so many classes at the same time was not feasible.
The institute is looking forward to resumption of offline classes when more than 90 per cent students are back on the campus.
At this moment 3,000-odd students — BTech, MTech and PhD put together — which translates to 20 per cent of the total strength are present on the campus, to attend online classes from WiFi-enabled hostels and to carry out research work.
The official said as many as 23 courses were run at the level of BTech, MTech, dual degree, BS (Bachelor of science) with 70 classes being held simultaneously on an average.
The institute has 10 to 12 smart classrooms that can be used to live stream lectures.
“We need that facility in all the classrooms. More than that we would require technicians who will oversee the operations of the hybrid facilities,” he said.
IIM-Calcutta has decided to create hybrid classes and it will take the institute or so to operationalise the facilities in about a year.
An IIT official said hybrid classes could be implemented in IIM-C that had much lesser student strength. “The student strength for the full-fledged residential programmes at IIM-C could be around 1,500. At IIT it is close to 16,000.”
A professor of IIT Kharagpur said the possibility of hybrid classes was discussed as the rate of inflow of students was slow at the tech school.
A feel of classroom teaching could be given to those who are away from the campus through the hybrid model, he explained.
“In this model, students can also take turns in attending the lectures. So, while a section of students can attend the classes that are being live streamed even as they remain at the hostels, others will be present inside the classrooms. This splits the assembly. But logistics is posing a challenge,” he said.
An official of the institute said they were exercising caution in calling students to the campus that had to be shut twice in the past 20 months to break the chain of Covid, following advice from the doctors.
“Doctors have reminded us that unlike other IITs, our institute is far-off from a city that has medical facilities to deal with a health emergency. Kolkata is almost 150km away from IIT Kharagpur. So, we are calling students in smaller volumes to avoid any assembly on the campus,” he said.
Tamal Nath, the registrar of IIT Kharagpur, said: “We are in constant touch with our students on how to resume academic activities on the campus.”