Varsities must transit to knowledge system: UGC chief
University
Grants Commission (UGC) Chairman Ved Prakash on Thursday called on universities
to graduate from the ‘learning system’ to ‘knowledge system’ to compete at the
global ranking level.
During
his inaugural address at a two-day national conference on 'Distance Education
in India: Emerging Challenges and Prospects,' held in Puducherry on Thursday,
Mr. Prakash said that most of the universities fell under the learning system,
which implied that knowledge created elsewhere was translated and certified on
the campuses of the universities.
“But,
we need to graduate from the learning system to knowledge system to create new
knowledge, besides disseminating and certifying this knowledge,” he said.
Mr.
Prakash underlined that global ranking system had become the seal of approval
for quality. At a time when none of the Indian universities figured in the
first 100 in the global ranking, the UGC Chairman said: “There are questions as
to why Indian universities are not in the first 100 in the global ranking. We
are under enormous pressure to compete at the global level where 15
international agencies are involved in ranking. Global ranking has become near
universal. It has become a seal of approval for quality. No country can afford
to fall behind in global ranking.”
Mr.
Prakash underlined that even at the national level, the institutions were under
pressure for the assessment and accreditation of NAAC and the National Board of
Accreditation (NBA) and National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF).
Stating
that Indian universities had been relegated to the background in the past 159
years after being pioneers in education, the UGC Chairman said that when the
universities entered the Humboldtian era in the 19{+t}{+h}Century, it created
structures of disciple like history, physics etc. “This system was accepted and
embraced at a greater speed by the U.S. and Japanese universities. The U.S.
universities outranked European universities at that time because of effective
governance of the university system and nationalisation of higher education.
They were able to establish a strong linkage between university and industry.”
He
added that since Independence, the number of educational institutions and
students enrolling for higher education had increased.
Bimal
Chandra Mal, Vice Chancellor, JIS University, West Bengal; Vimala
Veeraraghavan, former professor, Delhi University; H.P. Dikshit, former IGNOU
VC; Anisa Basheer Khan, Vice Chancellor, Pondicherry University; M.
Ramachandran, Registrar-in-charge and Sibnath Deb, Director-in-charge,
Directorate of Distance Education, Pondicherry University, also participated.
ODL
system
Talking
on the Open and Distance Learning (ODL) system, Mr. Prakash stated that there was
trust deficit among people due to some players in the system.
“The
resources that are generating through the ODL programmes by way of carrying out
massive recruitment of the students are not used for improving the ODL material
or the quality of instructional material or faculty development. In many
universities, the resources that are generated through ODL programme are used
to run the regular progammes of the university because they are not getting
adequate support from the state. Therefore, we are suffering from several of
problems,” he said.
He
instructed the institutions to reflect on the weakness of the current system
and deliberate on how to overcome it. “They have to prepare a framework for the
improvement what kind of framework should you come up with for qualitative
improvement, sustainability and ensure merit, governance and quality of
research,” he said.
Staff
shortage
When
asked about the shortage of faculty in Pondicherry Central University, he said
that the UGC had sanctioned the requisite number of posts and it was up to the
university to fill up the posts.
Source | The Hindu | 9 September 2016
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
Note | If anybody use these post for forwarding
in any social media coverage or covering in the Newsletter please give due
credit to those who are taking efforts for the same.
No comments:
Post a Comment