Dr. M. Anjum Khan is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Avinashilingam Institute for Home Science and Higher Education for Women, Coimbatore. She is a Ph.D. holder and has three certifications from NPTEL. And, is on to her fourth course.
So, what is extraordinary about M. Anjum Khan ? Anjum is visually challenged, and who better to vouch for the effectiveness of NPTEL.
Anjum has come a long way, from being a student dependent on classmates and teachers to help her with the teaching-learning process, to doing it herself online. She has mastered technology to assist her and take her along on her quest for knowledge. Her visual impairment is no deterrent to her continuous thirst for acquiring skills.
Once she submitted her Ph.D. thesis in 2012, Anjum joined her alma mater Avinashilingam as guest faculty. When she was awarded her Ph.D. in 2014, she became a full-time faculty. Even then she had friends who spoke to her about the NPTEL courses. But it was only in 2018 that she finally got to taking up the course.
She has done three courses, including one on Post-Colonial Literature, and another on Introduction to Modern Indian Drama, pertaining to her domain – English. She took necessary permissions from her university and wrote the examinations and got the certifications.
But what is of interest is the fourth course that she is pursuing now. A topic very close to her heart, Anjum speaks very highly of the “Introduction to the Disability Studies” course. “The delivery of this course is very good. The courseware is not just lectures, but also interviews. The course in-charge interviews people from various parts of the world, related to disability. It is very useful and engaging,” Anjum says.
The English courses were also interesting because Anjum chose to do these along with her students. As the courseware was designed in a way that it could be handled by students from the undergraduate level to doctoral scholars, she encouraged them to do the courses, and also discusses the contents with them. She watches some interviews along with her students.
She is highly appreciative of the course content and the flexibility it offers in accessing it. However, she suggests that some videos that run for 30 minutes can be divided into smaller components. “Sometimes we do not get time to watch it as a whole because of the long duration. Hence, we need to pause and watch it in four or five parts. If the videos are of shorter duration it is easy to watch at one go.”
For visually challenged students, she feels it would be useful if all the courseware videos came with transcripts that could be easily downloaded without assistance.
Anjum’s aim is to complete all courses in her English domain that NPTEL has to offer. In addition to this, she is keen to explore courses of interdisciplinary nature related to disability. She urges those with visual impairment to take up these courses as they offer the freedom that distance education mode courses do not.
This article is written by Ms. Amutha Kannan, The Content Curators
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