National Education Policy (NEP) 2020

Educators, what do you think of the National Education Policy 2020? What problems concerning higher education does it address? What are the challenges that still remain?

Recent years the higher education seen as job earner for most of the youth and very few opt higher education for research to find out solutions for the challenging problems. By introduction of NEP2020, the GAP and modalities of schooling education and higher education is seems to have bridged upto an extends.The new format in higher education allows students to switch from one course of interest to another without any problem. The focus on multidisciplinary courses specially if MERU get established as per NEP2020, will allow students to look around the new offbeat courses. The multiple entry/exit will save students time and interest in education. The new course structure will be seeing good in NEP2020 but it will be tested throughly once policy en-route into educational institutions.
The major challenge we are facing today about the quality of professional courses throughout the country and the employment generation. It will too early to say that the new policy will provide the market oriented opportunities to the youth.

We are excited to host a webinar on the Implementation of NEP 2020 in higher education institutions, today at 3 p.m. I invite our audience and readers to continue the discussion post-webinar on this forum.

We are posting the unanswered questions posed by the audience during the webinar on the Implementation of NEP in higher education institutions below, to help continue this discussion:

Ramakrishnan Sitaraman:

Are there any faculty development programs to help faculty members in mostly English medium educational institutions transition to, say, teaching or preparing online lessons in their mother tongue? Will the time invested in this effort be recognized distinctly from routine teaching, research and service?

Ramakrishnan Sitaraman

Faculty members may be effective at academic or even career counseling, but are emphatically not experienced in or prepared for the ‘emotional counseling’ part which can even lead to counterproductive outcomes. Why not require institutions to instead provide professionals who can perform this task effectively?

Saurabh Mahajan:

There’s a particular provision for up to 8 credits for teaching-learning/pedagogy courses for PhD students (during PhD). Are there any further plans or policies for this? How could a higher education educator get involved in this?

Saurabh Mahajan:

Quality research by faculty needs time- to think, to collaborate, to mentor students. Faculty from smaller/medium colleges do not find time because there’s lot of teaching and admin duties. I suspect because finances don’t allow hiring more faculty. Is this assumption true? What could be the solutions to this?

JS Kennedy:

I am working in a technical university. Under NEP 2020 will the university either be amalgamated with another traditional multi-disciplinary university or a technical university will have to change into a multi-disciplinary university?

Manohar GM:

Are we going to do away with the 3 years undergraduate and 2 years masters program and adopt only four year degree with honors + 1 year masters ( PG)?

Deepa GB:

Such a wonderful policy and complicated also. What are the strategies for implementation of this policy at higher education level?

Although the NEP 2020 values teachers and teaching in terms of detailed descriptions and it is a rising discussion in the world debates, we as a human society value teachers less and less in all the parts of the world in terms of salaries, freedom to experiment, growth benefits etc., how do we tackle that as a society?

For implementing multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary attitudes the teachers need to be trained in these approaches? Are such Professional development programs/ courses being planned out for teachers?

The section 5.26. talks about Shorter post-B.Ed. certification courses will also be made widely available. The current B. Ed Program itself needs some level of reforms, why not incorporate specialized areas such as leadership, management and special children teaching into B.Ed courses itself ( may be a 6 months dissertation )?

Innovative pedagogical approaches will also require innovative assessment methods . What kind of support framework would you suggest for teachers to actuate this?

The time frame for NEP implementation is given to be around 10 years . Is this time period divided into any phases tied up with specific milestones to be reached?

How would multidisciplinary approach of learning affect the employability of student, if the domain knowledge still remains a requirement for seeking the jobs?

Radical changes as envisioned by NEP requires serious thinking about education. However when it comes to our national institutes in science and technology, thinking about education and education research are not very core to them. Recently IISER Pune have decided to start a department of science education. However it is more of an exception. Are there going to be efforts to encourage starting such departments which are integral to turn the vision of NEP into a reality?

Faculty shortages are a glaring reality but that is not the real reason for lack of time to do research. Existing teaching learning methods are conventional which do not encourage active learner engagement resulting in poor time management. Leveraging online resources and technology for research and collaboration is inevitable in today’s context, just as it is for adopting hybrid teaching models. While limitations of financial resources are a fact allowing research scholars to take up teaching assignments and help in teaching duties will alleviate the existing hurdles, both on the teaching load of existing faculty and also allow researchers’ to be attracted to teaching profession.

Very useful chart, Dr. Shakila! Thanks for sharing!

The NEP 2020 promotes multidisciplinarity in UG education and offers multiple options to existing institutions. Since each HEI is an autonomous institution, it enjoys the freedom in choosing its own trajectory or future path. Each HEI must work out its own strategic plan of action, which is the Institutional Development Plan. Your institution can initially enter into academic arrangements with other neighbouring HEIs to be a part of an academic cluster until it can open new departments in other disciplines to become multidisciplinary. It is also not feasible that all disciplinary areas can be offered by each and every HEI. Some technical institutions are part of a larger umbrella group of institutions which offer programmes of study in other areas /domains/disciplines. The Governing bodies will have to examine such merger internally so as to achieve offering multidisciplinary undergraduate education. The decision is solely within the ambit of each HEI and not dictated or decided by external authorities.

To answer both the related questions on faculty ,here it goes:

1. As part of the NEP recommendations , modifications to align to NEP in the existing regulations for appointment and career advancement of college and university teachers are being worked out wherein weightages for the mentoring etc will e given due weightage. Current regulations already factor weightage for preparation of online modules.
2. There are several ongoing refresher and induction training programmes by UGC, AICTE and through PMMMNMTT centres in various areas or domains of capacity building. Under PMMMNMTT , ARPIT available on SWAYAM platform offers online modules and you can contact any of the course coordinators to delve into the methods pf preparing online modules.

Many institutions are engaging professionals in the area of socio-emotional counselling. However as faculty , the training programme do train in this area and such skills can be easily assimilated. With the evolving roles of faculty as enablers and facilitators, it is important that we acquire these new skills in our learning curve to become effective both within and outside the teaching learning environment.

wow i did not know education policies can look at teaching encompassing these new facets too- esp those that are for folks trained in social and emotional learning training