Personalized Assignments to Address Skills in a Heterogeneous Classroom: A Case Study of a Course on 'Smart Grid Technologies '

Engineering colleges in India, today are moving towards Outcome Based Education. One of the aims of OBE is to create a learning-centric environment for the students. A major challenge in Indian institutions is the wide variety of students who enroll to engineering colleges, with varying skills, interests and backgrounds. The general concept in traditional environments is to have common tests and assignments for all the students. This often leads to frustration in the students as they may not have the necessary skill set or interest to do the assignment. This paper presents the concept of creating personalized assignments in a course on Smart Grid Technologies and allow the students to choose what they want to do, based on their interest. Having different kinds of assignments, also helps in achieving more program outcomes than would be possible with homogeneous assignments. The feedback from the students is indicative of the need for and success of the experiment on personalized assignments.