Srinagar: To improve the quality of education in J&K, a total funding of Rs. 516.28 crores have been approved for J&K since October 2013 to January 2020, Human Resource Development Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’ said on Monday.
The minister was responding to questions in the parliament by All India Trinamool Congress MP Deepak (Dev) Adhikari and Shiv Sena’s Rajan Vichare who wanted know to whether the Government has any plan to improve the quality of higher education including Jammu &Kashmir.
To a question regarding whether any survey or study has been carried out recently to evaluate the quality of higher education in the country, the minister, according to Global News Service, said: “The National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) is an assessment process by which the quality of higher education is evaluated in the country. Till now 606 universities and 12709 colleges have been accredited by NAAC.”
Besides, he said, system of annual ranking by National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) for determining inter-se rank of higher educational institutions is also in use along with National Board of Accreditation (NBA) for assessment of quality in technical education. “Till now 4867 institutes have participated in NBA and NIRF,” he added.
To improve the quality of higher education, the minister said that government has started Annual Refresher Programme in Teaching (ARPIT) to improve the quality of teachers.
“To improve the quality of learning, NAAC has initiated reforms through its processes and methodology paradigm for providing accreditation framework that is ICT enabled, scalable and based on fairness and transparency.”
These “reforms”, the minister said, show a right path to ensure quality and high standards in higher education institutions.
Similarly, he said, under University Grants Commission’s Implementation of Quality Improvement.
Programme, many initiatives were undertaken to facilitate quality improvement in education.
He said Deeksharambh, a guide to Student Induction Programme’, has been launched on 18 July last year. “In 8 Regional Workshops 1650 candidates participated. Total 319 HEIs have implemented the Student Induction Programme.”
He said new curriculum in 16 subjects which is based on learning outcomes based curriculum framework (LOCF) has been uploaded on UGC website to facilitate universities to revise the curriculum.
He also said under Use of ICT based learning tools for effective teaching learning process, 125
Universities have come on board for accepting credit transfer for MOOCs courses done through SWAYAM platform. (GNS)
