Policy. Pedagogy. Purpose.

Walking into university for the first time can change the course of a life, and so can walking out with a degree. The National Education Policy 2020 set out to take Indian higher education to the next level, and it named the problems that students and teachers had long lived with. THES asks what that promise means for each student. What lifelong goals do Indian freshmen bring with them on admission? What do they expect their college or university to do to help them get there? And how ready are institutions to deliver?

Families weigh these questions when choosing where to apply, and students weigh them again before placements. THES looks beyond whether higher education “works” and asks how meaningful it is to each student. Students’ goals differ, so the impact of policy should differ too. Across four academic years the surveys will build a comprehensive, high-quality database on teaching, learning and student support in India, and universities nationwide are now being invited to join the 2027 Freshman Survey as partners.

1. 2026–27Freshman
2. 2027–28Faculty & Administrative Staff
3. 2028–29Senior Student
4. 2029–30Employer

Asking ChatGPT to tidy your grammar is not the same as asking it for your argument, and neither is the same as submitting an essay it largely wrote. Generative AI now sits inside students’ everyday academic work: brainstorming, outlining, drafting, editing and summarising. Universities are left with a hard question: where does legitimate help end and misconduct begin?

Many institutions are answering with disclosure rules that ask students to declare whether and how they used AI. That raises a second question: does being open about AI make its use more acceptable? This study examines how students judge AI-assisted work, whether transparency changes those judgements, and whether the effect depends on how much of the intellectual work the AI did.

Beyond content, technology and technique, which practices create meaningful learning and leave a lasting mark on students? Drawing on the research behind What the Best College Teachers Do, this workshop series, led by the Vice Chancellor, invites faculty to step back from everyday routines and reflect, in small groups, on what enables students to think deeply, question, explore and learn.

Evidence-based classroom strategies built to scale into institutional practice: instructor cues and growth mindset, challenge-based pedagogy, observational learning through faculty think-alouds, and nano-module shorts as augmentation.

Learning rarely happens alone. The Learning Science Unit studies the social, interactive and communicative dynamics that drive it: how people build knowledge together, solve hard problems as a group, and learn inside shared communities. Drawing on social constructivism, educational psychology and interaction analysis, the team runs empirical studies of peer learning, group problem-solving and team dynamics, both in the classroom and online. It asks how discussion and collaborative technologies shape engagement, critical thinking and collective intelligence.

The work ranges from close analysis of how small groups talk to the design of inclusive, collaborative learning environments. Findings go back to educators, community leaders and institutions as practical strategies and cooperative-learning frameworks. The aim is learning that is more collaborative, more empathetic and more effective for every kind of learner.

• Motivational & affective aspects of learning
• Cognitive & neural foundations of learning
• Social & cultural aspects of learning

How does a learner’s cognitive load shift between generating an idea with AI and critiquing an AI-generated one? The project combines NASA-TLX task-load profiling, a Cognitive Budget Framework and a comparative study of leading language models, with an eye on what chronic co-pilot use does to long-term memory.

India’s cities still run largely on fossil fuels, and moving them to low-carbon energy is among the country’s defining challenges. Cleaner supply is only half the answer. The other half is circularity. This project asks what it would take for Patiala to move from a linear to a circular energy economy, one that is economically viable, socially acceptable and institutionally supported. It also asks how TIET can act as the catalyst for that change. The goal is a city that turns its pressure points into resilience, with healthier ecosystems, a stronger bio-economy and more secure livelihoods.

As cities grow, land shifts between forest, field and concrete. That puts biosphere integrity, one of the nine planetary boundaries, under pressure in Germany as much as in India. This study follows the carbon. It compares Potsdam, where urban development is framed around cutting emissions and adding green space, with Patiala, where urban forests are managed piecemeal. It first maps land-use and land-cover change from open data, then couples those maps with forest-inventory records to estimate how much carbon urban forests hold. The resulting nexus analysis feeds a decision framework on when to maintain and when to transform urban forestry, so that every hectare of green space works harder.

Parcels of land lie neglected across India’s cities, even as urban growth erodes biodiversity, disrupts water cycles and wears on public health. Urban forests can reverse much of that. They conserve biodiversity, support health and economic growth, and soften the regional effects of climate change. This project classifies urban-forestry practices by what each site needs and gathers the approaches for bringing underused land back to life. It also brings local and regional stakeholders into the picture, along with the governance problems that usually surface only once work has begun. The result is the Sustainable Urban Forestry Approach (SUFA), a step-by-step framework for greening neglected land that advances several UN Sustainable Development Goals at once.

Surveys have well-known limits. This project takes another route: inferring hidden psychological traits from the way people naturally use language. Its test case is Excellence Orientation, a measure developed at TIET of the practices and perceptions behind an individual’s or an organisation’s drive to go beyond ordinary standards. The case was chosen because it is demanding but feasible. Alongside it, the team is building a chatbot that gathers data on the Big Five personality traits through conversation.

Excellence Orientation already has an established scale. The next test is whether it predicts real outcomes. This study extends the scale to establish its predictive validity, the evidence needed to treat Excellence Orientation as a cultural dimension in its own right.

Neuromarketing has long belonged to well-funded laboratories. This vertical builds tools that smaller organisations, institutions and businesses can actually use to see how people respond to their products, services, advertisements and websites. It starts with signals almost anyone can capture, such as webcam gaze estimation, mouse movement, clicks and dwell time. These are then validated against eye tracking, EEG and ECG. InsightUX turns an ordinary webcam and browser into a lightweight system for analysing attention and user experience. RHYDHAYA extends an existing wearable ECG platform into multimodal sensing across ECG, EEG and eye tracking.

Social insects build intricate structures with no one in charge, each responding to the traces the others leave behind. This vertical asks how far human teams can coordinate the same way. Instead of waiting for central instructions, people respond to shared cues, visible actions, task updates and digital traces. Behavioural and computational studies, followed later by EEG work, examine how team composition, psychological differences and communication structure shape the quality of coordination, adaptability and collective performance.

In a crowded conference hall, a poster has moments to win attention. This vertical is building a platform that reads a poster for visual hierarchy, readability, clutter, layout and information flow. It then checks its AI recommendations against where real viewers look, using eye tracking. The aim is to move poster design from taste to evidence, and eventually to an intelligent co-design partner that helps researchers communicate their work and widen its reach.

Sanskrit carries one of the world’s great libraries, spanning philosophy, logic, linguistics, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, aesthetics and religious thought. Yet an adult who wants to read it faces a poor choice. There are pre-recorded lectures with no one to answer questions, and there are live classes at fixed hours that few working professionals can keep. The Sanskrit Learning Engine is built for that learner. It is an AI-supported web platform that is interactive, progressive and entirely self-paced.

Indian philosophy lives in classical texts, layered commentaries and a technical vocabulary that takes years to master. Darśana gathers it into one structured and authoritative digital knowledge engine for study, preservation, analysis, translation and dissemination. The engine will bring texts, concepts, terminology, inferential structures and analytical tools together in one place. The first module is Nyāya, the tradition of logic and epistemology.

How was knowledge carried from teacher to student across generations? This textual research examines the modes and mechanisms of transmission in the Indian philosophical schools, the artistic traditions and the diverse Tantric traditions of India. It will produce scholarly white papers and research publications.

Kaithi was once a script of everyday administration in Bihar, and many of the state’s land records are still written in it. Few people can read it today. By July 2026 the team’s model was reading printed Kaithi with more than 91% accuracy, and the results were presented to the Government of Bihar in Patna on 12 July. Since then the model has been trained on handwritten land records. It now reads them with more than 85% accuracy and produces text that can be searched and edited. A second presentation to the Bihar Government is planned.

A critical edition means tracking down every surviving witness to a text. The team has secured printed versions of several texts, but copies of the manuscripts themselves have been harder to obtain. In December the team will travel to the places where the manuscripts are kept.

What if your study partner stopped you halfway through a chapter to check that you had understood? VidyaAI builds the principles of active learning into an AI tutor. Students upload their course materials and work through them in conversation with an LLM agent. The agent pauses at regular intervals to quiz the student on what has been covered before moving on. Each session ends with a report on the student’s progress and help planning the next stretch of study.