Teaching is my passion and for me, it is an art of delivering my knowledge to fellow students, and something that rejuvenates my soul. The basic notion of teaching is not only to educate but to transfer knowledge to students in a manner that promotes learning. Therefore, it involves practicing various techniques and teaching models to imbibe the interest in the subject.

Teaching Philosophy and Methodology

While teaching, my objective lies in imparting knowledge in an interesting and productive manner, which involves using a variety of teaching methods. I plan to introduce the topic with some videos of current research trends of the topic and its interesting applications, which motivates my class to learn the topic and apply it to develop something useful for the community. As I have delivered several tutorial sessions at IIT Ropar and also taught in various institutions, my teaching sessions are generally interactive to promote student involvement and enhance the learning process. I always motivate students to develop the art of curiosity by asking questions as and when necessary. Since many students are introverts, I would also encourage students to bring their doubts or problems of any kind that affect their understanding or learning process. Being teachers I feel it's our responsibility to understand students if they are facing some problems at their personal front that affect their performance.

I believe in teaching through practice, and therefore plan to involve various practical activities in the form of group projects and presentations, research projects (6-8 weeks), that help achieve overall development of the students’ personality and their soft skills. Such activities would help students to overcome the exam pressure, boost confidence, and build a strong foundation for their future job venues (industry or academia). I also plan to include a significant component of research seminars, discussions, and presentations in graduate-level courses. Such activities generally become a source of new research ideas and help students learn the art of reading research papers effectively and efficiently. To promote the research interest of undergraduate students, I would motivate them to interact with the graduate students and work together through the mode of research projects. In such a manner, the under-graduates benefit by learning the problem-solving, planning, and paper-writing skills from the graduates, while the graduates learn the art of mentoring.

For performance assessments, I prefer to follow a continuous assessment model, whereby I plan to include several quiz assignments, weekly assignments, and lab assignments in my course. Such an assessment method helps to have a better idea of weakly performing students in the class and provide the necessary help in a timely manner. Further, I plan to include surprise quizzes in my course which help the students to learn continuously and avoid exam pressure towards the end-semester exams. I plan to practice taking Anonymous Feedback (Course and teaching) through the online medium of Google Forms on a weekly basis. I also believe that for the long-term improvement of the course contents and structure, it is always great to have Anonymous Course-Feedbacks after the mid-semester and the end-semester exams. I believe that such feedback practices always help in improving the teaching-learning process.

Teaching Experience

My teaching journey started during my under-graduation when I started teaching my younger brother and his friends. At Panjab University, discussion on some critical problems in the areas of Discrete Mathematics, Database, and Software Engineering was always my favorite. I conducted various student activities, such as analytical puzzle-solving competitions, audio-visual quizzes, and code hunt events.

At NITTTR Chandigarh, I delivered various expert talks on Security Using Open Source Software (OSS) Tools in several short-term courses (STC) and workshops funded by the Ministry of Education, Government of India. In these STCs, we connected with various remote institutions through Google Hangouts and delivered live sessions and demonstrations on OSS tools. On 22nd December 2013, I got my first live teaching experience, when I connected with seven remote institutions through Google Hangouts and delivered my session on OSS security tools. This video session was recorded and is still available on the NITTTR Chandigarh website and youtube page. I developed various software applications (Web-based Evaluation Performa and Crypto) for training the STC participants (technical teachers from various institutions). As a part of a team, I also represented NITTTR at an International Level in the World DIDAC, India 2014, the largest International Exhibition and Conference for education and Training Resources on 10-12th September, held at Pragati Maidan in Delhi. We were there to demonstrate the use of OSS tools and provide information about NITTTR. After submission of my Master’s thesis, I taught in various GATE and UGC-NET coaching institutions, and also developed my YouTube Educational channel “Ritu Kapur Classes'' which now has 10.9K+ subscribers. As NITTTR did not have any under-graduates, my audience was almost always the faculty from various teaching institutes.

At IIT Ropar, I performed TA duty for five years in six different courses and worked with 11 faculty members in the courses: Theory of Computation/ Logic and Computability, Machine Learning, Software Engineering, Introduction to Computing, Data Structures, and Algorithms. During my tenure, I provided various tutorial sessions, took lab sessions, prepared the draft of various quizzes and lab assignments, helped in the evaluation of various quizzes, lab assignments, semester exams. While setting the questions, I always ensured a mixture of difficulty levels in the draft. During this period, I taught several programming concepts in the labs, interacted, and helped the students learn the fundamentals of programming. Since the course was taken up by the first-year students, I also shared the importance of documenting the code and report writing. Due to positive feedback from the students and their comments on how they benefited from the lab sessions, I was appointed as the TA for the “Introduction to Computing” and “Data Structures and Algorithms” multiple times with a comment as “Student’s Preference”. During my TA, I employed the use of various software tools, such as MOODLE and Google Classroom for posting assignments and evaluations, Google Meet to conduct remote interactions and viva of the students, Google Meet Attendance, and MOSS plagiarism checker.

In the tenure of performing TA in computing lab courses for 4.5 years, I have managed around 250 students/ course and managed 30+ junior TAs (7 per course). I have also credited 6 courses (UG and PG-level) of my interest to strengthen my knowledge, viz., Introduction to Databases, Advanced Operating System, Approximation Algorithms, Logic for Computer Science, Multimedia Systems, and Advanced Topics in Internet Technologies.

Mentoring Experience

During my Ph.D., I got the opportunity to mentor eight students who were selected as summer interns by my supervisor. Two major research projects covered in this tenure were i) Predicting the Bug-Fix time in OSS projects using Machine Learning models, ii) Detecting Irrelevant Third-Party Libraries in Java applications. I was involved in various research discussions with the interns and got the experience of executing a planned research procedure for them. One of these works is under review in ENASE 2021.

Courses I’m Interested in teaching

By leveraging my knowledge of working in a System’s Domain, and that gained by crediting various courses, and performing TA, I would like to teach the following courses:

• Under-graduate level courses: Introduction to Computing, Data Structures, Algorithms, Programming Languages, Discrete Mathematics, Software Engineering, Open Source Software, and Databases.

• Graduate-level courses: Natural Language Processing, and Text Mining.

• New Graduate-level courses: Knowledge-based Engineering covering the essentials of Information retrieval, data preprocessing, knowledge-building, and developing expert systems and knowledge warehouses, Mining Open Source Software Repositories, Sentiment Analysis and Text-data mining, and Crowdsourcing environments and their applications.

I plan to motivate the undergraduate students, in the courses with a well-aligned scope, by including a project component (6-8 weeks duration) in my courses. They may collaborate with the postgraduate and graduate students to gain paper-writing experience and thereby aim at publishing in leading conferences. The post-graduate and graduate-level courses will comprise a major research component, several research paper discussions, and presentations.