Abstract—This paper describes the methodology used for
training a large number of engineering college teachers using
synchronous technology in India. The goal of these synchronous
workshops is to improve the quality of teaching in higher
education by training a large number of teachers in a short time.
The paper presents the survey results of fourteen workshops
conducted in synchronous distance mode from the year 2009 to
2013. From the survey, we found that a large number of young
teachers, female teachers and teachers in rural colleges are
benefitting from the workshops. Even though the participants
attended these workshops in the distance mode, the survey
results showed that the participants’ perceptions on the quality
of instruction, workshop content and quality of audio-video
transmission were good. On an average about 90% of the
respondents rated their experience as excellent or good. We also
found that after scaling up the number of participants from
1000 to 10000 teachers per workshop, there was a slight dip in
the rating, but the overall level of satisfaction of the participants
was not much affected due to scale up.
Index Terms—ICT enabled workshops, teacher training,
synchronous distance education, descriptive statistics,
perception, satisfaction.
The authors are with the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India (e-mail:
kalpanak@it.iitb.ac.in, knn@iitb.ac.in).
Cite: Kalpana Kannan and Krishnan Narayanan, "Synchronous Teacher Training in India: A Study of Perceptions and Satisfaction of the Participants," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 200-207, 2015.