A larger role awaits college teachers

Updated on: Tuesday, March 23, 2010

The State Higher Education Council has kick-started a unique drive to develop a culture of designing courses among college teachers. The aim of the programme is to foster a new culture among the teaching community by involving them in designing academic courses.

Going by the response to the project, teachers seem to have whole-heartedly welcomed the initiative. The council has received over 90 proposals from teachers in universities and colleges across the State in the first phase of the programme. Some of the areas covered under the new proposals include agri-business management, bio-ethics, human rights, economic geography, disaster management, environment and development economics, landscape architecture, nanotechnology, quality management, reliability engineering, sports journalism, virtual education, opto-electronics and election studies.

Pointing out that the purpose of the council in offering opportunity to teachers to design new courses inter-disciplinary in method and offering the latest knowledge in terms of content is to bring about a fundamental change in the position of the teacher in the educational process, Mr. K.N. Panikkar, Vice Chairman of the council, told The Hindu-EducationPlus, that the existing mode of preparing a course is an exercise in stringing together a number of topics.

There is hardly any attempt to spell out the aims and objectives in detail and to suggest how and why a course is structured in a particular manner.

After all, the undergraduate and postgraduate courses only help the student to nibble at the discipline. The choices made in the bargain and rationale influencing the course character, therefore, needs to be explained.

The endeavour would be to give importance to methodology and inter-disciplinary studies, both being crucial for training the students to attain higher levels of competence, he said.

Improving quality

Explaining that the involvement of teachers, much beyond the curriculum transaction in the classroom, is a pre-requisite for improving the quality of higher education, Mr. Panikkar said that the freedom and opportunity for designing courses is one among the many ways in which teachers could creatively participate in the educational process.

Currently, in the making of the syllabus, which they diligently cover in the classrooms, their voice is hardly heard.

This often leads to disconnect between the purpose of the course and its practice. In such a situation, teachers tend to become indifferent and unresponsive towards academic demands as is happening today.

This can be overcome only by bringing the teacher to the centre stage by assigning greater role to them in the making of the curriculum and syllabus they transact in the classrooms.

In other words, by assigning them an active role in the entire process of academic practice, he said.

Well-equipped faculty

Stating that teachers have to be well-equipped to deal with different dimensions of academic functions for fulfilling such a role, Mr. Panikkar said that one among them is the ability of the teacher to devise courses in the area of their specialisation.

Given that a large number of teachers in Kerala hold research degrees, their expertise could be gainfully employed to design courses in new emerging areas. Most of the existing courses are poor in concept and content. And as a consequence, they are neither exciting nor intellectually challenging to the students or to the teachers. They have to be replaced by good courses. What constitutes a good course, however, is not easy to determine. Generally an interesting course or well-communicated course is perceived as a good course. But then, an interesting course need not necessarily be a good course in terms of content of knowledge. Similarly, a well-delivered course may not excite the students to think critically, he said.

Describing that there are four qualities inbuilt in to a good course that include creating ability to think critically, preparing ground for specialisation, integrating necessary knowledge from other disciplines and that contains student-centred pedagogy, Mr. Panikkar said that thus the measure of a good course is not only the basic knowledge of the discipline it contains, but to enable the students to approach critically and guide them towards new frontiers of knowledge.

Elaborating on the objectives of launching such a programme, Thomas Joseph, Member Secretary of the council, said that enlargement of the academic space to accommodate diverse academic choices/needs of students assumes prime importance with the universities in the State switching over to choice-based course-credit and semester system for undergraduate programmes.

While the change over to the new system may not by itself provide a wide variety of choices to students in the selection of courses in the immediate future, it nonetheless has installed a system that could progressively widen students' choices.

The new structure provides for multidisciplinary and inter-disciplinary explorations under the category of open courses.

The institutionalisation of the system of cluster of colleges would also potentially open up the choices actually available to individual students, more so when the proposal for student movement across colleges within the same cluster materialises, Mr. Joseph said.

Reminding that the impact of the freedom that the new structures offer would depend to a large extent on the ability and willingness of the teachers to design new courses and offer them to the students, Mr. Joseph said that at present individual teachers are little equipped to design courses.

The old order never demanded such skills from them. Courses were designed by invisible boards of studies which met once year for two or three hours. No wonder, the same courses, with minor changes, continued to be prescribed year after year. Moreover, the emphasis was on ensuring uniformity of syllabi and courses offered in different institutions within the same university, not on diversifying syllabi and courses. Hence there was little scope for designing a wide variety of courses, he said.

Mr. Joseph said that the sheer variety of subjects covered is possibly an indication of the process and prospect of enlarging student choices.

The course designers will attend a three-day training programme on ‘How to design an effective course' to be held at Thiruvananthapuram from April 26 to 28.

The council would assign an external supervisor to each principal course designer.

The external supervisor would guide the principal course designer online and monitor his progress and certify the quality of courses designed. The course designers will be required to submit the courses designed by them and get it certified by the external supervisors within a period of three months.

Mr. Panikkar said that the council has embarked upon an ambitious scheme to provide opportunity to a fairly large number of teachers to express their vision in creating courses in order to effectively communicate the knowledge in their area of specialisation. Such training would equip the teacher to begin at the beginning-to design the structure and content of a course which they would be able to teach eventually. This indeed is short of imparting training to all teachers in pedagogy and provides opportunities to internalise the latest developments in the discipline.

Opportunity to design courses would appear as a small step. Nevertheless, an important step, Mr. Panikkar said.

A larger role awaits college teachers

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