BHUBANESWAR: In a bid to improve the skills and employability of students in government-run higher education institutions (HEIs), the Higher Education department has decided to integrate FutureSkills Prime courses of Nasscom into the undergraduate (UG) curriculum from this academic session.
The courses will be introduced as ‘add-on’ courses and students can earn two to four credits by pursuing them online. Secretary of Higher Education Department Arvind Agarwal on Friday asked heads of higher education institutions (HEIs) to operationalize the various ‘add-on’ skill courses under the FutureSkills Prime - a digital skilling initiative of Nasscom - into the UG curriculum. On a pilot basis, 61 government and aided colleges representing each public university and eight public universities with UG teaching facilities have been selected for the purpose. Students of these HEIs who chose to take up the FutureSkill Prime courses will be monitored by Nasscom team members.
The FutureSkills Prime courses of Nasscom focus on building technology skills spanning over 155 skills for more than 70 job roles on 10 emerging technologies and 10 non-tech skills. Nasscom will provide facilitation support to the colleges for student registration as well as motivate the students to take up the courses. “Students can register on the FutureSkills platform and they have to learn these courses online. All the courses are free and the certification is through qualifying for an online proctored examination conducted by the organization offering the course,” he said.
State public universities will offer these add-on courses during different semesters of UG courses. The grade points obtained from the FutureSkills Prime platform will be mentioned in the mark sheet under the heading ‘Add-on Courses’. After qualifying for the examination of the courses, students will get certificates. As far as employment is concerned, Nasscom will bring different companies/industries to hire these Nasscom-certified students through a selection process.
Earlier this year, the department had signed an MoU with Infosys and Nasscom to skill, upskill and reskill 8 lakh students across 1,100 colleges and universities in Odisha in key technologies, crucial for today’s digital ecosystem under its FutureSkills Prime program. Besides students, the MoU aims to skill the existing faculty in key technologies in the digital ecosystem. The collaboration focuses on developing technical expertise across various disciplines and promoting digital fluency.
IT ADVANTAGE
Number of ‘add-on’ available - 15
Courses include Python Fundamentals, Data Science, Cyber Security, Cloud Computing, etc
Students of 61 colleges, 8 public universities with UG classes can take up ‘add-on’ courses
Students can earn 2 to 4 credits per course