Starting from the coming academic year, technical colleges across India will be required to offer semester-long modules to help freshers adjust to college life and beat stress.
The All-India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) wants all colleges affiliated to it — around 10,000 — to make these modules a necessary part of their course structure without awarding any grades for them. The Indian Institutes of Technology, too, will have these modules, but the duration for them may be just a couple of months.
The blueprint for the courses has been put in place by a professor at IIT-BHU, who was earlier with IIT, Hyderabad, where he developed the module.
Deal with stress
“The module will work on students’ communication skills, help them come to terms with failures in life, learn situational decision-making and negotiate dilemmas in life,” a senior official told The Hindu . Moral and ethical values will also be part of the module, he added.
Colleges may also take help from NGOs or contact psychologists for these. “Since students in many colleges get into engineering courses without sound fundamentals, there may be classes to strengthen their concepts in maths and physics,” he added.
Professors who have worked on such modules will conduct workshops for the faculty of engineering colleges to help them structure their modules. Plans are also underway to create online videos so that faculty from other colleges can get useful inputs to put such modules in place.
