The spotlight is on Dr. Ritu Ahluwalia, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Gyan Ganga Institute of Technology and Sciences, India.

The Gyan Ganga Institute of Technology and Sciences (GGITS) is one of three colleges comprising the Gyan Ganga Group of Institutions. Based in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh state, the colleges emphasize industry alignment in the curricula of their 40 collective areas of study.

The goal of Gyan Ganga (River of Knowledge) education is to prepare students for careers in computer science, engineering and business through hands-on practice with related technologies. GGITS became an Oracle Academy Institutional member in 2019, initially focused on database management and programming.

Dr. Ritu Ahluwalia heads up the database management program in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. She also teaches computer science and business systems courses to undergraduates at GGITS. She is the main point of contact for the Oracle Academy program for all three Gyan Ganga institutions, coordinating the teaching and learning of Oracle technologies across the many faculties and departments.

Oracle Academy: How did you become involved with Oracle Academy?

Ritu Ahluwalia: My association with Oracle started in 2001 when I became interested in Oracle databases and applications and passed the Oracle Certified Professional (OCP) exam. As an OCP, I began teaching database management at various organizations using the materials supplied by Oracle University, mainly Database Foundations and SQL Programming. Over the years, I have never found anything that could compare with Oracle in clearly explaining database design and database programming.

Later, when Gyan Ganga joined Oracle Academy in 2019, I introduced the entire database and Java curriculum.

Oracle Academy: Terrific. What is your the role as the main point of contact for Oracle Academy at Gyan Ganga?

Ritu Ahluwalia: It’s a privilege to have this role because I am in constant interaction with Oracle Academy, identifying resources that can be mapped to the multitude of courses we run at GGITS and the other colleges. Whenever we incorporate new subject matter, I coordinate with Oracle Academy to organize teacher training through our Faculty Development Programs. In the past year we have supported students specializing in data science and cloud computing by introducing Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning with Java and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Foundations.

Oracle Academy: Is there anything else on your radar?

Ritu Ahluwalia: More than just radar, at present I am exploring the use of Oracle Primavera for our civil engineering and associated departments. Already two batches of students have enrolled in Oracle Primavera P6 Professional Project Management Fundamentals to gain a good grounding in resource allocation and management. My belief is that Oracle’s P6 project management resources will soon be widespread within our institution.

Oracle Academy: And how much of the database and Java resources do Gyan Ganga faculty use?

Ritu Ahluwalia: We are fully fledged! By fully fledged I mean that myself and other professors teach the whole curriculum, all four Oracle Academy database courses and all three Java courses.

We begin with Java Foundations, move onto Java Programming to explain object-oriented programming and, once students are exposed to the main concepts, we introduce Database Foundations, then Database Design and Programming with SQL. In the sixth semester, when they have large projects to work on, students learn triggers and procedures using Programming with PL/SQL and Oracle Cloud.

All in all, we are taking advantage of everything that Oracle Academy has to offer. When aggregating all the faculties across our colleges, some 900 students are exposed to Oracle Academy courses and 400 have Oracle Cloud accounts.

Oracle Academy: We hear you have run an interesting competition based on Oracle Cloud.

Ritu Ahluwalia: Yes, it was amazing. I helped to launch the Oracle Academy Cloud Developer Drive, a virtual website-building competition for students from different streams across our institution. Participants were asked to build a web solution with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). A total of 1,200 students used the Oracle Academy Cloud Program and registered for Oracle Cloud Free Tier accounts.

Oracle Academy: Wow. Please tell us more…

Ritu Ahluwalia: It was a month-long competition in which students worked with tools such as Oracle APEX and SQL Developer to build apps and construct websites. I enlisted volunteers from Oracle India to mentor the participants. These were professionals with many years of experience in SQL programming and cloud technologies, who helped students to map out the virtual machine environment and walk them through OCI features to get their workspaces ready for the contest.

I also secured the Oracle Cloud Free Tier accounts which granted participants access to the tools available through OCI.

Oracle Academy: With 1,200 participants it must have been hugely compelling! Who won?

Ritu Ahluwalia: The winning entry was a web app and e-commerce site. The winning student deployed Oracle Cloud tools to create an online student store selling books, stationery and clothing. He came up with a microservices architecture for deploying the web application using Oracle VM instances, Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing Database, object storage buckets and Oracle Load Balancer. It was a rigorously designed and attractive platform overall.

Oracle Academy: Excellent. And do you continue to incorporate Oracle Academy Cloud Program in your teaching?

Ritu Ahluwalia: Yes, above all the Autonomous Database and Oracle APEX. APEX is wonderful. During the pandemic when all classes were online, I gave each student a cloud account so that they could use APEX to practice SQL commands, and learn how to create different database objects. They also used SQL Data Modeler to understand conceptual and physical modeling of databases.

They could do exercises in the cloud, save them to their workspaces, and we could review their work and grade it. Because each student had a separate account, I could check the logs, provide them with scripts, supervise them and guide them when encountering errors. APEX really helped me and my colleagues in the challenge of switching from the classroom to hands-on practical classes online.

Oracle Academy: How is the job market in the Jabalpur region of India?

Ritu Ahluwalia: There are a great many opportunities for our graduates and Gyan Ganga’s insistence on industry-aligned teaching and learning helps them considerably. Many of our students are hired by multinational technology companies along with other private and public sector firms.

Oracle Academy looks good on their CVs and many students take part and win prizes in nationwide hackathons. This gives them a further career boost. Generally speaking, graduates from the computer science and engineering programs find work as database analysts, financial analysts, business analysts, and, now that we have AI/ML, data scientists. Once we roll out Primavera to our future civil engineers, they will have a leg up in project management positions.

Oracle Academy: Very promising. Finally, what interests do you have outside of teaching?

Ritu Ahluwalia: Well, I make sure to stay up to date on Oracle technology and I’m particularly interested in data analytics and in exploring all the available tool sets.

On the home front, my family comes first. I love cooking. And I love singing. The two go together at home but I also sing outside, solo or in groups. That’s my main hobby.

Thank you, Dr. Ritu Ahluwalia, for your passion for Oracle Academy and for preparing your students to make a positive impact.