Sameer Sahasrabudhe
Director at The Educational Multimedia Research Centre
Sameer had notebooks filled with sketches as a child, having always nurtured a creative bug inside of him. His love for illustration developed into a passion for animation, music, architecture, and his other artistic interests, all playing a role in his innovation of E-learning.
Animation
Sameer Sahasrabudhe is a visual designer, an animator, and an educational technology evangelist from India. Currently, Sameer is the Director of the Educational Multimedia Research Centre at Pune (Maharashtra, India), where he oversees the production of content for the national MOOCs platform: SWAYAM, and several government educational television channels.
Armed with a Bachelor in Fine Arts he made his first career move toward the advertising industry. Ambitious and deeply passionate about his trade, he decided to enhance his knowledge and skills by joining an advertising agency. He gained valuable experience over the years working there and meticulously crafted advertisements by hand in the pre-computer era. Advertising was an outlet for his creativity however he found himself wanting to move towards his illustration roots and hence learning animation felt like a natural progression.
Sameer enrolled himself in a 3 years course where he learnt the art of animation. The course was designed and offered by experienced animators from Russia with an extensive emphasis on traditional cell animation techniques. Subsequently, he joined an animation studio where he was part of a team which created the first animated feature film in India ‘Bhagmati’. During this period, he mastered digital animation and was leading the editing and the visual special effects for the film.
Improving Education with Technology
However, he was fascinated by the application of animation for educational communication. He wanted to create educational animation, to scaffold students to grasp concepts that are not easily displayed through other media, for example showing the chemical processes that occur when iron ore is heated and melts instead of merely a video of iron ore poured into a furnace.
This quest led him to the best technical education institution in the country, IIT Bombay, where he contributed to various projects in the realm of educational technology. It is here that he received guidance from experienced teachers, to pursue his research. He received his PhD in E-learning animation creation where he explored the teacher-animator relationship. The animator must be able to understand the subject matter expert and vice versa. To improve this mutual understanding, he created a standardized template with which both could understand and communicate their ideas to each other.
Becoming a Research Scientist
As a Research scientist, he has co-developed the Learner–Centric MOOC (LCM) model and the MOOCs platform: IITBombayX. He incorporated the LCM model to create MOOCs for various platforms and chose his expertise in animation to create a course on 3D visualization and animation. He crafted this course by adding various principles from visual design, user interface design, and multimedia design, in addition to the learner-centric approach. This course was subscribed by over 55000 learners across the world and had several offerings on multiple platforms. This popular course was shortlisted for the edX prize 2019. Since then, it has been made available as a free eBook on popular demand!
Sameer’s career trajectory connects the highly subjective domain of visual design to the relatively objective domain of digital education. This is a natural progression of observation and visual design in the Fine Arts domain carried forward to the narration in the animation domain and followed by an algorithm-based replication model to scale. His ability to figure out an algorithm that works across various domains from advertising to e-learning has helped him to codify and transform subjective skills into replicable systems.