COIMBATORE: Following strong opposition from professors to Bharathiar University’s decision to implement a new syllabus for the first-year undergraduate courses less than a month before the commencement of semester exams, the university withdrew the new syllabus on Thursday.
When asked about the move of changing the syllabus, one of the Bharathiar University Vice Chancellor’s committee members, who did not wish to be named, told TNIE, “One month ago, the board of studies and syndicate members approved the new syllabus named Industry 4.0. Meantime, the State government directed that Tamil subjects should be implemented in the third and fourth semesters in the second year for Commerce and Computer Science streams.”
“As a result, we took a month and recently updated the new syllabus, Industry 4.0, in the portal. But, private colleges requested to implement the new syllabus from the next academic year as there would be difficulty in completing the new syllabus before the exams, following which it has been withdrawn and the exams will be held in the old syllabus,” the member said.
K Leninbarathi, assistant professor of physics in a private college welcomed this move and he told TNIE, “Earlier, the assistant professors were stressed as to how to complete the new syllabus within a short time, but now we are relaxed after they decided to withdraw it.”
V Krishnamoorthy, assistant professor of commerce in a private college told TNIE, “I was shocked to see that MS Office, which is one of the most important parts of the syllabus for commerce stream, was changed in the new syllabus. We request the university not to remove MS Office next year too, and we suggest that the university should include Industry 4.0 syllabus as add-on courses.”
According to sources, the objective of the syllabus is to understand the basic principles and technologies of industry 4.0, to enable the students to learn about Artificial Intelligence and Data analytics and the books for the new syllabus are written by BU’s former VC P Kaliraj.