Makeover for degree courses soon

Updated on: Tuesday, May 19, 2009

The restructuring of degree courses in the State has taken one more step closer to reality. The Inter University Committee on Regulations for Restructured Undergraduate Courses has put in place a common skeleton of rules that would govern the conduct of such courses in each university.

The six-member committee itself was the result of a meeting of all Vice Chancellors organised by Kannur University recently. Based on these recommendations that are available in the website www.kshec.kerala.gov.in, each university will now frame regulations for degree courses after making necessary variations/additions to the draft guidelines of the committee. Once such regulations are put in place the restructured degree courses can be made operational for the academic year 2009-10.

The Kannur conclave has also resulted in some significant changes to the draft regulations for restructured degree courses initially prepared by the Kerala State Higher Education Council (HEC). Earlier, the HEC had recommended that there should be 10 common courses for the restructured degree programme—courses that would have to be studied by any student irrespective of the subject he chooses to study.

But many academics pointed out to the HEC during various discussions that this recommendation would create workload-related problems in colleges. So the inter-university committee decided not to disturb the workload but change only the pattern of its distribution across departments.

The committee has now said that six common courses would be compulsory—four English courses and two additional language courses. Students would have to take four more common courses, but they can choose them from among eight options. These eight courses have been listed by the committee as multi-disciplinary. In other words, the common courses offered in a college would depend on the choice of the students and on the availability of teachers.

According to Prof. Thomas Joseph, member secretary of the HEC and a member of the inter-university committee, this is because of the differences in the internal distribution of workload for teachers from different universities.
Open course

The committee has also recommended that an open course be given to a group of 15 students or more. The maximum strength of an open course would be 75. Now, a small group of students cannot decide to study one paper in a college; the whole batch has to do it.

In the new course, 15 students can come together and ask for a course. Of course it would be impractical to offer a course for smaller groups, Mr. Joseph reasoned. In the restructured programme physical education would be a teaching subject. The number of credits offered for open courses has been halved by the committee.

The HEC had earlier recommended eight credits for open courses; there could have been two papers with four credits each or four papers with two credits each. Now, there will only be four credits for such courses. One credit will mean five contact hours a week. So, if there are two courses, each period will have a duration of 2.5 hours. The choice would have to be made by each college depending on the availability of teachers.

The hindu

Makeover for degree courses soon

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