In 21st century, engineering education in India faces significant challenges as it requires meeting the demands of technical profession and emerging job market. Researchers have found some universally preferred, yet challenging skills for global workforce, e.g., science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), statistics and data analysis skills, are of the topmost priority. Moreover, after being the signatory of Washington Accord, India needs to reinvent not only the India Inc., but also its technical/engineering education system. Recently, we have witnessed a major shift in customer relationship and business strategies of corporate houses. Nowadays, e-learners and online consumers are increasing, for which we have to update our digital world, i.e., infrastructure, content/domain knowledge, educators/HR trainers. Thus, our technical faculty should need to learn the innovative approaches to teaching and learning, which in turn will require effective professional development for both new and experienced instructors alike. It is high time now to redesign our curricula, pedagogy and make the pre-service teacher preparation programme mandatory part of technical higher education.

The changing nature at workplace coupled with changes in socio-cultural level has led to imbalance in the work and personal lives of employees all over. Increasing demand, rising awareness among women, increasing stress levels, increasing family levels etc., have made it difficult for people to cope with their work and family lives. With increasing stress levels and demands at the workplaces, attrition rate in organization is increasing. Therefore, the present day organizations are required to create a flexible environment which would help employees to manage their work and family together. This paper brings forth such issues and practices prevailing in Indian context. The materials reviewed were obtained through searches of academic, business and sociological data base containing generalized research evidence and case study findings. It includes academic journal articles, books, research reports and materials oriented to business community.

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This study attempts to assess and compare the residential and non-residential schoolchildren in information-processing skills and creative thinking abilities. A sample of 80 children from Classes 5 and 7 were selected from two types of schools, residential/ashram (02) and non-residential/formal schools (02) in Bolpur subdivision of West Bengal in India where the medium of instruction is Bengali language/mother-tongue. All the children were individually administered the PASS (Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, Successive), Stroop,, and creative thinking tasks. The residential school children were found to perform better both in information processing and creative thinking tasks. The developmental trend could not be clearly observed due to small sample size, but with increasing age, children were using better processing strategies. Due to ashram environment, creative pedagogy, and various co-curricular activities, the residential school children were found to be more creative than their formal school counterparts. Moreover, some significant positive correlations were found among information processing skills and creative thinking dimensions.

The objective of this study was to compare the impact of flipped mode and traditional mode of instruction, on the learning outcomes of Grade VIII school children in History and Science; 90 primary school children from Odisha (India) were randomly assigned to either of control (traditional instruction) or experimental (flipped instruction) group. Pre-test scores of both the groups were compared through "t" test; the obtained "t" values of −0.019 and 1.931 were found to be insignificant (p > 0.05) which revealed no significant difference between these groups at the beginning. Thus, both the groups were assumed to have equal variance and after 01 month their post-test scores in History and Science were again compared to examine the impact of different instructional intervention/s. The obtained "t" values of both the groups' post-test scores comparisons were −5.592, −3.260, found to be significant at p < 0.01 level, and confirmed the difference between control and experimental groups. Mean scores of flipped and traditional instructional groups further strengthened the positive impact of flipped mode of instruction on children's learning outcomes in History and Science. The study recommends for future work on flipped instruction with larger sample for educational implications.

In educational research the relationship between affect/emotion and performance on cognitive tasks is well documented in both the neuroscience and psychology literatures. Researchers have claimed that emotions play a vital role in perception, learning, decision making, rational thinking and other cognitive functions. At the same time some others have added that both the positive and negative affective states are equally important in the learning process. In the real-life physical learning environment students' affective feedback is a major cue that human tutors use to constantly adapt their teaching strategies, so that learning would be most effective and efficient for each individual learner. Thus, in e-learning environment it's a research issue to think about how to design an artificial affective tutor or pedagogical agent, who can respond to students' emotion and accordingly guide and motivate them for better learning. However, for post-secondary learners it may be relevant, but for secondary level Indian students can it be feasible and cost-effective ICT learning tools. This raises many more questions about content, pedagogy, software designing and implementation of affective pedagogical agents as ICT learning tools in Indian school education system.

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