APJ Abdul Kalam Technological University (KTU) has decided to increase research at its nearly 150 affiliated colleges. The syndicate decided to allocate ₹4.79 crore to set up sophisticated research facilities to encourage technical research with a focus on achieving a knowledge-based economy.
A syndicate meeting chaired by Vice-Chancellor MS Rajasree also decided to make available to all universities the services of Elsevier, a leading publisher of world-class scholarly research publications.
This would allow students to access up to 300 scientific journals free of charge. The university will also acquire Knimbus mLibrary, a digital library platform, to digitally distribute Elsevier’s journals and enable students to download and read journals on their mobile phones.
KTU also decided to purchase Turnitin, a web-based plagiarism detection service, to prevent misconduct in research papers. The software would also be made available to the affiliated universities. A patent database is also being developed in collaboration with patent research agency Derwent Innovation to patent research results.
The university also decided to ban two teachers from compulsory examinations for two years because of errors in the evaluation of the answer sheets. One of them, a faculty member of the Vijnan Institute of Science and Technology in Ernakulam, had made mistakes in the evaluation of B.Tech civil engineering papers in the seventh semester.
The measure was taken following complaints from students at the Marian Engineering College in Thiruvananthapuram.
Another teacher, a faculty member at Nirmala College of Engineering, Thrissur, is also facing disciplinary action for making errors in grading work on financial markets and services in fourth-semester MBA exams. The university has announced that the university ID cards of the two lecturers will be temporarily cancelled.
The syndicate also approved policies proposed by a subcommittee consisting of Pro-Vice Chancellor S. Ayoob, G. Venugopal and Vinod Kumar Jacob to address similar issues regarding valuation errors in the future.
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