NEW DELHI: The maiden Common Universities Entrance Test (CUET), touted as a single-window solution to cumbersome college admissions, had a bumpy start in 2022, but the year belonged to the new National Education Policy overhauling the country’s academic structure. Major promotion of mother tongue, including teaching engineering and medicine, and soon legal education, in local languages, immense flexibility to students by providing them multiple entry and exit in courses and easing PhD rules are sweeping measures that will change the face of education in the coming years.
The year also saw India’s premier educational establishments – Indian Institutes of Technologies (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Managements (IIMs) — bettering their international rankings, paving the way for strengthening their global presence by opening up offshore campuses.It will be two-way traffic as foreign universities open their campuses in India, making global standards in higher education affordable at home.
The coming year will focus on one of the major initiatives of the education ministry, the National Credit Framework (NCrF), for which Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan launched a public consultation on October 19. The first-of-its-kind framework in India, NCrF, to be launched in 2023, aims to integrate academic education and skilling. It is a unified credit accumulation and transfer framework, which applies to school, higher and vocational education providing flexibility to students to pick their learning trajectories, as it allows for mid-way course correction or modifications according to their talents and interests.
On the anvil is also the Higher Education Commission of India, for which a committee was set up to merge the University Grants Commission (UGC), All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and National Council for Teachers Education (NCTE). Though the proposal first came in 2018, it is one of the significant transformations suggested under NEP 2020. According to University Grants Commission Chairperson Prof M. Jagadesh Kumar, in 2022, the Commission introduced many initiatives and encouraged higher educational institutions (HEIs) to implement them effectively.
One such achievement was when several educational institutions registered for the Academic Bank of Credits (ABC), which paved the way for uploading students’ credentials on the ABC Portal.ABC is a virtual/digital storehouse that contains information on the credits earned by individual students throughout their learning journey. It will enable students to open their accounts and give multiple options for entering and leaving colleges or universities.
“With the enabling provision of allowing students to pursue two academic programmes simultaneously, the UGC has created multiple formal and informal learning pathways. UGC’s Professor of Practice will pave the way to increase institution-industry collaborations,” Prof. Kumar told this newspaper.