AICTE to make teachers’ training mandatory for all faculties in technical colleges

BHUBANESWAR: All India Council of Technical Education(AICTE) is to introduce six-month faculty training programme mandatory for all teachers. Through this programme AICTE aims to train and upgrade around five lakh faculty members in different technical colleges across the country in the next two to three years, said chairman of the council Anil D Sahasrabudhe here on Tuesday.

“AICTE is developing the teachers’ training programme through which we want our teachers to understand new ways of teaching and learning. In the past we used to have lecturers, who come to class and write notes on black boards for an hour. But now students don’t have patience to listen to someone for an hour. So it should be 10 minutes of teaching, some discussions and watch videos from professors across the world,” said Sahasrabudhe.

He said, all new teachers who are likely to join the profession have to undergo the training while for existing teachers it will be a precondition to attend the training to get promotion. “So naturally all four to five lakh teachers will be upgraded in the next three years and we can have best quality teachers,” he added.

The apex body of technical education in the country AICTE has also asked all affiliated colleges to follow a model curriculum developed by the council by this year end. “Curriculum revision and update is top of our priority. AICTE has revised the curriculum of all programmes and provided it to the colleges to follow it. They colleges have to adopt 80% from it and the rest 20% they can include depending on the local needs,” he said.

Admitting that around 55% students of India’s technical institutions don’t have employability, Sahasrabudhe said, “Curriculum revision, practical exposure and increasing communication skills will help in increasing the employability of students.”

Talking about the large number of engineering seats lying vacant in the country, he said, “Number of students joining engineering courses has not reduced. We are taking into account the AICTE affiliated colleges only. But a large number of students are joining deemed and private universities, which have come up in the last few years, are not counted,” he pointed out. He blamed lack of jobs is the main reason for students not interested to join engineering.

The new curriculum has included practical aspects of engineering in which students have to visit industries and to the society to identify challenges and bring out solutions. The council has also made two internships mandatory for all engineering students from this academic session.

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bhubaneswar/aicte-to-make-teachers-training-mandatory-for-all-faculties-in-technical-colleges/articleshow/60278822.cms