Academic calendar will be on schedule, says AICTE chairman

Mumbai: Chairman of the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), Dr Anil Sahasrabuddhe said that educational institutions would stick to the academic calendar as announced for next academic year despite Corona and wanted students to return to campuses as early as possible albeit with necessary precautions and safety measures in place.

The AICTE governs courses of engineering, Vocational education, technical education, Pharmaceutical education, Architecture, Hotel Management and Catering Technology, Information Technology, Town and Country Planning, across the country. The University Grants Commission (UGC) recently on July 6, issued guidelines to Universities to conduct examinations by end of September and new academic term is expected to start soon thereafter. 

Speaking at a webinar on “Reopening Higher Educational Institutions Safely’ hosted by CII on July 11, Sahasrabuddhe also ruled out any slashing of syllabus. “Syllabus need not be reduced; it’s not necessary that entire content is delivered.  Students could be given some foundational part and ask to explore further. Rather than covering (entire) syllabus, it needs to be uncovered and create excitement so that learning goes in auto mode.”

He urged the over thousand-odd Universities and 40,000 plus colleges in India to adopt their own blended course of teaching depending on their modalities within the broad parameters set. He recommended Swayam, an online open online learning platform, which offered over 2500 courses and was used in over 114 countries by over a crore database users.

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The critical laboratory experiments could also be taught in virtual labs, which had hundreds of simulation based experiments available for every subject and unlike physical experiments could be done by hundreds of students simultaneously and parameters could be changed easily.  Suggesting that online education was here to stay, Dr Sahasrabuddhe said that the need of the hour was for the government to touch base every nook and corner of the country with fiber optic lines to ensure every hamlet and village had electricity and internet in post-pandemic India.

Admitting that access to internet and devices was a challenge, he felt that either government or individuals could provide students with devices like smartphones or laptops to ensure access to online education. While the modern era focused on teaching in the form of classroom, online, blended, experiential, project based learning etc, he stated that as per ancient Sanskrit literature, there were 32 different ways of learning and “we have to unearth and experiment each model.”

Others like Dr Timothy Gonsalves, founder-director of IIT, Mandi in Himachal Pradesh also stated that online assessments were not feasible in India in the wake of challenges like network connectivity, access to devices and even basic uninterrupted power supply being an issue. Citing their experience of conducting online exams, he stated that with students spread across the country, his faculty ended up spending over an hour taking viva exam for each student, thus making it untenable for large number of students.

Harping on the importance of college experience, he termed this batch would face a deficiency in college experience that would reflect later in their careers. He explained thus: “A lot of learning takes place outside the classroom not from faculty but from peers especially for 18-22 year-olds.” Hence, he opined that online education could be good only for self-motivated elder people and not for the 18-22 year-olds.