Jai Kamal's Blog : Work in Progress

Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?

There are two types of people Who work only when there is a lot of pressure on them. They need to be pushed through deadline, appraisal, assessment, training etc. Who are self motivated. They work better if they have freedom. We can belong to any of the above categories. Actually, we belong to both depending upon the task. Let us take the example of Virat Kohli, He might need a push in bowling. Does he need any push in batting? obviously not. In my opinion, if he is pushed for batting, his performance might decrease. In other words, he needs freedom in batting. In General, the freedom could be in setting your deadline, choosing the style of working , identifying the set of tasks to reach the goal  etc. Do you need full freedom? No! If given full freedom you might not perform at all.Let me take my own example, In semester vacations, my productivity is lower than normal semester days.I generally start my vacation with full enthusiasm with some ambitious goals.For first fe...

I think there is need of MOOCs for all the levels of education (Primary,Secondary, Senior Secondary, Higher Education) in different educational medium(Hindi, English, Tamil , Telugu, Gujarati etc). The main advantage of MOOCs is its accessibility, thus it can help us in addressing the problems related to Quantity. Refer my old blog-post for categorization of problems in education. It can also cater to the Quality of education provided that MOOCs are created by top schools. one such example is NPTEL, where professors from IITs, IISc and other premier institute contribute for quality MOOCs. NPTEL is focused only to Engineering courses.There is need of developing such MOOCs in social sciences and humanities also. In my opinion, we can develop MOOCs for K-12 education as well. Schools across India differ in terms of quality, pedagogies and curriculum. We can ask top schools of India such as DPS,Chinmaya vidyalaya, Kendriya vidyalaya etc to come up with MOOCs. In this way, we will be able ...

Let me describe one common scenario "The race". Two persons A and B are running on parallel and straight tracks in a 5 day race. A person is considered as successful at any stage if he is ahead of other. A started with a point 200 km ahead of the point from which B had started. In other words, A had head start of 200 Km. A travelled with 20km/h and B travelled with 15 km/h for first day. Next day, A travelled with 20km/h and B increased its speed to 20km/h. On the third day, B further increased its speed to 25km/h while A travelled at same speed 20km/hr. Who is ahead at the end of 3rd day? Obviously A is ahead by 2000km as he was already having a head-start of 2000km. even though B has outperformed A on day 3, he hasn't won the game. Wait! Game is not yet over. However, B can take two decisions at this stage: a) Even though he is trying harder than A, he is still behind A and hence he should give up. b) He should give tougher fight to win as he has travelled more ...

According to Wikipedia, " Blended learning is a formal education program in which a student learns at least in part through delivery of content and instruction via digital and online media with some element of student control over time, place, path, or pace ." These models of learning is used by both job market and academia. There are various models such as flex, Rotation, Self-Blend, enriched virtual model, la carte model etc. Three major models are discussed below. Flex Model In this model most of the instructions are online.Teachers provide assistance in-person only if there is need of assistance.The schedule of classes is decided by students and face-to-face interaction is minimal in this model. Rotation Model In this model mode of instructions (online & onsite) are rotated on a routine basis. This rotation schedule is generally decided by teachers. Students mostly learn at traditional schools with brick and mortar structure. Self-Blend Model In this model students th...

This is a branch of economics which deals with economic concerns of education policy. It starts with the basic demand for education and financing of education but it is not limited to that framework. A lot of work has been done including Becker's Human Capital theory, Screening Hypothesis, Job market signalling , capability approach, social choice approach etc. Some economists have also worked on below mentioned topics: Education and economic growth(Endogenous growth theory) Education as a public good Financing of public education Returns to education Economic assessment of training schemes Measuring productivity and Input out analysis Market failure in education In my opinion, a lot of work is still needs to done in this field. some of the topics of future research could be "Economics of technology enabled education", "Finance of PPP in education" etc.

I am just posting  my experience of participating in StatWars- An event conducted by Department of Business Economics, University of Delhi in its annual flagship event Vishleshan. (Eventually, I ended up winning the event). As this event was related to predictive analytics, those who do not have much Idea of predictive analysis can refer to my past post  How can you learn Predictive Modelling? Introduction to StatWars In this event we were asked to predict whether the residents of the city will purchase the one time investment scheme or not. The full problem description is here . My Methodology Before explaining the methodology, I assume you have some idea of four algorithms namely logistic regression, random forest, decision tree and knn. I used an ensemble of these four data mining algorithms. There are two ways of understanding my code 1. Read Individual codes and then read Ensemble.R (Which might take longer but this is better way) 2. Just read the Ensemble.R and forg...