BHUBANESWAR: Even as the Higher Education department is aiming at improving teacher education in the State, the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) has decided to treat the new academic session of 2022-23 as ‘zero academic year’ for Teacher Education departments of three universities of Odisha.
These universities are Khallikote University, Rajendra University and Kalahandi University that run teacher education departments on self-financing mode.
The NCTE took the decision as the universities failed to submit their performance appraisal reports (PAR) for the academic session 2020-21.
A zero academic year is one during which no academic activities can be conducted including classes and examinations.
Accordingly, the universities will not be allowed to conduct any classes for their Bachelors of Education (BEd) programmes in the academic year. Each of the three universities have a student intake capacity of 50 in the department.
The NCTE has mandated all teacher educational Institutions including government universities offering the course to file PAR for every academic session. This was introduced for better monitoring, transparency and improvement in the quality of teacher training being offered by the institutions.
For 2020-21, the PARs were to be submitted online to NCTE between September 30,2021 and January 29 this year. Following requests by some institutes, the NCTE had extended the deadline to April 2 this year. However, authorities of the teacher education departments of the three universities did not submit it.
In a letter to the three universities on Wednesday, Principal Secretary of the Higher Education department Saswat Mishra directed the Vice-Chancellors to take stringent action against the officials responsible for not submitting the PARs on time which led to the zero academic session penalty by NCTE.
While authorities of Rajendra and Kalahandi universities could not be reached for their comments, Vice-Chancellor of Khallikote University PK Mohanty said the university could not submit the PAR due to various reasons. “But we have sent the physical copies of the PAR to the NCTE two days back,” he said.