The immediate priority of the newly re-constituted Kerala State Higher Education Council (KSHEC) will be to persuade universities to comply with UGC stipulations for Choice Based Courses (CBC) and Outcome Based Education (OBE), newly appointed vice chairman Rajan Gurukkal has said.
The council shall seek to influence Vice Chancellors for strict adherence to UGC norms in the recruitment of teaching faculty of university departments and help the government in getting the best qualified Vice Chancellors appointed, he added.
In an interaction with The Hindu, Dr. Gurukkal said meritorious teaching faculty alone could ensure quality teaching and research. “For ensuring their recruitment the State needs high-profile academics as Vice Chancellors who understand merit and seldom compromise. Universities should be completely under the control of academic power, and never under the imposition of arrogant and under-qualified administrators. The council has already made statutory amendments to achieve all this,” he said.
“I feel that teaching how to learn and deepening learning through systematic unlearning have to be resuscitated as inevitable constituents of quality assurance. The UGC wants maximum flexibility about choice and scientifically designed courses. CBC envisages growth of cross-disciplinary communication among students, which is at an abysmally poor level due to the interdisciplinary illiteracy of teachers. OBE insists on determination of learning outcomes as the first step in course designing. Outcomes decided upon should evolve out of the contents, instructional strategies, learning experiences, methods of evaluation, and assessment. They act as a running thread of quality control across the planning of curriculum, selection of instructional strategies, choice of learning experience, and preparation of tests,” he said.
Informing learners about the outcome well in advance, OBE enables ongoing concurrent self-assessment of learners for making sure of their progress towards attaining the outcome.
Higher education institutions should draw the local society closer to them and strengthen the public claim on the institutions to get knowledge-based help for improving their livelihood and quality of everyday life.
Learner ecosystems
Turning campuses into learner ecosystems is another priority. There are smart classrooms, but very few smart professors. We need smart campuses with niches of electronic sophistication enabling effective groups learning, natural and effortless. It is necessary to build up learner eco-niches at appropriate points on the campus for individualised learning as well. Higher learning is inevitably a self-directed and highly personalised process of unlearning. We should provide appropriate environment for it, Dr. Gurukkal said.
In reply to a question, he said RUSA funds were primarily for infrastructure development and they were now being administered by the Department of Higher Education. In the next phase, the funding was going to be for academic quality enhancement projects and the involvement of Higher Education Council would be necessary, he added.
