HRD ministry meetings related to Skill Development in Indian Higher Education including India-US dialogue on it

Some extracts and comments from press notice issued on Consultative Committee meeting of Indian Human Resource Development ministry (education ministry) mainly on skill development, 21st Nov. 2014, http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=111672

The Meeting of the Consultative Committee of Parliament for the Ministry of Human Resource Development was held here today. The subject of discussion for the Meeting was Skill Development in Higher Education. A presentation was made to the Members of Parliament by the Department of Higher Education on devising a framework for effective integration of skills and knowledge. The focus of the Presentation was on mainstreaming skills in Higher Education and improving social values for both skills and vocational sectors.

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The Meeting emphasised the need to remove the tag of inferior stream for vocation. The main points of discussion were; need for formal certification of providers of vocational services; promoting lateral and vertical mobility as an effort to integrate skill and vocational development with main stream general education; credit framework for seamless integration of pursuit (of) academic knowledge and practical vocational skills.

[Ravi: I very much like the thrust of the new government, including its hon'ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, in focusing on practical skills education in the higher education sector in India. That, IMHO, is the crying need of the hour for students, parents and industry, and so, the nation as a whole.]

Many other initiatives were also taken up for discussion; National Employability Enhancement Mission (NEEM); setting up of Sector Skill Councils in the field of education; Community College Scheme; Choice based system; Credit Framework of NSQF (National Skill Qualification Framework); and Skills Assessment Matrix for Vocational Advancement of Youth (SAMVAY).

[Ravi: Sounds great! Let's see how these initiatives fructify at the ground level.]

The Members of Parliament expressed their appreciation on the steps taken by the Ministry of Human Resource Development towards skill development in Higher Education. They also expressed their concern on the quality of Higher Education and Employability in our country.

[Ravi: I like that. The members of the highest body of the Indian government, namely the parliament, being concerned about the employability of students coming out of the Indian higher education system is very, very welcome. That concern may be the key driving force in reforming Indian higher education to ensure better teaching & learning of skills that make students employable.]

Also present at the Meeting from HRD Ministry were Secretary Higher Education Shri Satya N Mohanty, Additional Secretary, Shri Amarjeet Sinha, Additional Secretary, Ms. Vrinda Sarup, and many other senior officials of the Ministry. The AICTE Chairman Shri Mantha and the UGC Chairman, Prof. Ved Prakash were also present on the occasion.

[Ravi: So the top policy makers associated with higher education were present at the meeting including the top academic administrators of India, namely the UGC (http://www.ugc.ac.in/) chairman and the AICTE (http://www.aicte-india.org/) chairman.]

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In this context, readers may be interested to see another press notice dated 17th Nov. 2014 on "India-U.S. Higher Education Dialogue ", http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=111498.

An extract from it:

The India-U.S. Higher Education Dialogue was held at New Delhi today. This Dialogue was Co-Chaired by Mr. Satya N. Mohanty, Secretary, Higher Education, Ministry for Human Resource Development, India and Mr. Richard Stengel, U.S.Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. This was the third Dialogue in a row, after the first one held in Washington in June 2012 and the second one in New Delhi in June 2013.

The Dialogue explored various forms of collaboration between the two countries, especially in the fields of development of community colleges, massive open online courses, student and faculty exchange and skill development. The two sides reiterated the importance of the Higher Education Dialogue to promote enhanced opportunities for student and scholar mobility and faculty collaboration between the United States and India, including our ongoing collaboration on community colleges, improvement of workforce training, expansion of research and teaching exchanges, collaboration on education technology and innovation, and industry-academia linkages in higher education.

A Meeting of Joint Task Force on Community Colleges was also held prior to the India-U.S. Higher Education Dialogue and both the sides affirmed the importance of ongoing community college collaborations to meet Prime Minister Modi’s National skills development goals. The Task Force on Community Colleges discussed a plan for implementation of the recently concluded Memorandum of Understanding signed between the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC).

[Ravi: Overall this is positive though the first two dialogues in the past two years don't seem to have made very big impact. Perhaps this time around the impact will be stronger. I am particularly interested in the community college collaborations between US & India to meet PM Modi's national skill development goals, and (improvement in) industry-academia linkages in Indian higher education. I wonder what exactly the abovementioned recent MOU between India's AICTE and USA's AACC covers.]

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VIT's flexible credit system seems to give students a lot of choice in courses, teachers & timings

Today's The Hindu carried, in its weekly educational pages, this article, The power of choice, http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-educationplus/the-power-of-choice/article6581729.ece, which describes the pros & cons of a flexible credit system followed by Vellore Institute of Technology, Tamil Nadu, India, http://www.vit.ac.in/. Please note that it is a private university (a deemed university) which seems to have a philosophy of high quality at free market sort-of fee structure i.e. high fees. [This longish blog post of mine, Private Deemed Universities - A model for excellence in Indian technical education? But what about its high costs to students, and so, social impact?, https://eklavyasai.blogspot.com/2014/05/private-deemed-universities-model-for.html, dated May 2014, has some info. about its fee structure (in May 2014) in the lower half of the post.]

A small extract from The Hindu article mentioned above (about VIT FFCS - Fully Flexible Credit System):

I spoke to educators and other students about the system. In the FFCS, the college puts out a broad framework of academic courses and credit requirements and steps back. Then the students pick their courses, the pace at which they want to complete them and, happily, the teachers as well. An entrant registers for courses that he/she likes and draws his/her own academic plan. The system allows students to alter their choices as they go along — after assessing their ability to complete the courses chosen.

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The article gives interesting pros & cons of the system. A student is quoted, "The faculty is being assessed, so there is accountability."

I like the choice being given to students related to teachers. In the deemed university that I served, due to, I guess, faculty size limitations and other limitations, very limited choice was given to students related to courses (and so teachers associated with those courses). And when I studied Physics in the early 80s in Mumbai I don't recall any choice at all (within the Physics courses that I had to do).

The choice being extended to timings is quite surprising to me. I wonder how the university and campus administration manage to run the show with all these choices, even if the maximum amount of choice seems to be available at the beginning of this choice being exercised by students (via some software, I presume) with the amount of choice reducing later on.

Another point that strikes me is that VIT may be able to provide such a sophisticated choice system to its students as its high fee structure enables it to maintain requisite numbers of quality faculty that would be needed to fulfill the student choices. Academic institutions that are always low on funds as they charge low fees (or, in few institutions, no fees) may simply not be able to maintain the large numbers of faculty needed to provide choice of this kind to its students.

On browsing the Internet I came across this academic conference paper (4 pages) related to this system in VIT, Effects of FFCS (Fully Flexible Credit System) on Learning Experience and Academic Performance, published in Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences. 3rd Cyprus International Conference on Educational Research, CY-ICER 2014, 30 January – 1 February 2014, Lefkosa, North Cyprus. Its abstract and pdf are available in the third table entry in this link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/18770428/143/supp/C. Please note that the authors of the paper are with VIT, the institute whose FFCS system was studied, and so the study is not by an unbiased third-party.