To begin with, UGC needs to get the right credit

As I made my way through the various documents that are commonly referred to in any discussion four-year bachelor’s degree program In India – starting with Choice Based Credit System (CBCS), the Learning Outcome-Based Curriculum Framework (LOCF), and the University Grants Commission (UGC)’s latest draft National Higher Education Qualification Framework (NHEQF) document – ​​the lost graduate student in me was delighted.

implications for teaching

Anyone who has gone through the rigid and very old curriculum structure of degrees like B.Com or BA in most of the Indian universities would be really happy to see the choice, flexibility and liberal ethos inherent in their vision. Following the proposed changes in higher education under new education policy (NEP), it seems Indian students are finally ready to get a real education and not just a piece of useless paper in the form of degree certificates. However, despite this bold approach, there are considerable gaps at the conceptual level that need to be addressed before its implementation. Here I tackle the effects of the credit system currently envisaged in these documents. face to face Teaching quality and research productivity of the faculty supported by NEP.

While the NHEQF strives to provide much needed clarity on a variety of issues in the early and later years of a four-year degree, from related nomenclature to types of courses and multiple exit options, it continues to equate one credit to one tuition. . Bell If core courses of six credits and electives of four credits are to be followed, of CBCS or LOCF credit structure, it has serious implications for the teaching workload (which is not discussed much in any of these documents). At six credits for a core course, a faculty member will end up teaching approximately eight hours per course per week, with an emphasis on tutorials in classes of no more than 20 students. If a faculty is responsible for course content, assessment and grading, as mentioned by the NEP, this will require at least double the hours of preparation. Given the considerable ambiguity in the details of the faculty workload of the UGC, many institutions may inadvertently burden a faculty member with mechanically two such courses, which add up to 16 hours per week.

explain the credit

Before we move on to this issue, let us think about the concept of academic credit. Although often used as a unit to describe workloads for students, its meaning and interpretation varies across continents. In the United Kingdom or under the Bologna Process, a core undergraduate course may be listed as six to seven credits, indicating the total expected engagement from the student, including time spent in lectures and tutorials. The implications of the faculty teaching load are very different from those of students. A seven-credit course can mean approximately two hours of teaching per week, with the remaining hours being credited for preparation and assessment. The standard workload for a faculty is usually decided through negotiations between faculty associations and university administrations, making it difficult to obtain official information. But a quick search on Google reveals that a faculty at a typical UK university is expected to teach around two hours per week.

In the United States, the situation is slightly different. The credits listed for a course usually indicate the hours of class occupancy, in which the actual workload on students remains undefined. On average, at most US universities, a typical undergraduate course is of three credits and, therefore, approximately three hours of total classroom teaching for one faculty per course. Depending on the nature of the employing institution, the faculty workload at a research-intensive university can vary from between two courses per year at a community college to four or five courses per semester. Obviously, faculty with a lower teaching load has higher research productivity, and possibly better content and delivery in teaching. A credit also signifies the minimum skill attainment to graduate from one level to another in education. Based on personal experience teaching at US universities, a three-credit course would mean at least four additional hours for the student, making it the equivalent of six to seven credits of a core course in the UK.

in India

Despite these differences between the treatment of credits on both sides of the Atlantic, one thing they have in common is that faculty teaching hours per course are much lower than those currently prevalent in Indian universities and mentioned in several UGC documents. If higher education regulatory bodies in India are serious about increasing the research productivity of faculty while staying true to the liberal ethos of the NEP, we may not have course credits directly proportional to teaching hours. Or reduce the credits per course in line with practice at North American universities. We must ensure that teachers have enough time to create quality learning materials and engage in research. For this we have to train the students to take more responsibility for their learning. Given the high number of students who need to be educated in India, creative developments such as technology-assisted large classes for introductory courses in universities help graduate students as teaching assistants to reduce the time and effort of teachers. Solutions can be implemented.

On a more fundamental level, we must acknowledge the resources and time it takes to produce research and teaching. Otherwise, we risk adverse consequences that would undermine the objectives of the NEP. The vision is grand and needs a lot to translate into reality. However, we now need to clearly articulate the resource requirements for this vision. The higher education sector in the US, which appears to form the basis of much of what is said in the NEP, has evolved to its present state over a period of at least a century. It is one of the least regulated educational sectors in the world. Therefore, we are deliberately trying to replicate the result of organic unregulated growth through policy change. It’s like taking a finished product and reverse engineering it to figure out how to produce it. As a start, we need to think about how to devise rules that encourage stakeholders in the higher education sector to behave in a way that collectively leads to the desired outcome. No trivial task, I would say!

Parag Waknis is Associate Professor of Economics at Dr. BR Ambedkar University, Delhi. Views expressed are personal