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NAAC Accreditation and Quality Shift in HEIs

  Recently, in a get-together of Principals, a colleague of mine stated loudly that NAAC accreditation doesn’t really help improve quality of practices in a college. For reasons known to him best, he also said that I may not agree with what he said. Even before this colleague stated thus the thought has been around. It has become common place to run into fellow academicians who ask the what-has-accreditation-got-to- do-with-quality question. If one happens to be part of the college level Higher Education leadership, the question seems to make a lot of sense.  This is so because during such leadership encounters, more often than not, one is reminded of umpteen instances of disconnect between the practices of many Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and the NAAC-scores. The performance bubble which was fully blown up to scale with the accreditation criteria shrinks back to the facts of the non-accredited past reality. In other words, the affairs at the HEIs drop back to the defaults
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A Course for all Horses?: Rethinking NET Coaching at HEIs

  Isn’t it time we rethought the excessive thrust attached to providing National Eligibility Test (NET) Examination Coaching to students at College / University campuses? There are many colleges in the Country which spent a lot of time and energy singularly focusing on making the Postgraduate students clear the NET examination. As a Teacher License Test which will enable them to take up teaching as a vocation, it is significant. Though it is fine to make the students capable of cracking the NET / JRF Tests, the lopsided importance attached to the same invites a rethink. For a number of reasons, there must be reservations on putting all your money in the NET Exams. Teacher-promotion of teaching as the only serious vocation too is a troublesome thought. To begin with, of the plethora of career pathways which open up after the graduation/ postgraduation, that of teaching at College / University level is just one. Though community may attach more value and significance to it, it stil

Don't Little Fascisms Add up?

    Like all evils, many of us seem to wake up too late to realize that fascism has been around us for long. Not just that, it has been cuddled and nurtured in many ways by many of us, if not all of us. But the belief that little acts of illogical intransigence may not be dangerous enough to harm the Republic has kept us, our home grown varieties of fascism, going. As always, when you find someone who has got rich, doing what you did for fun or what you dropped after practicing small scale, you find your eyebrows arching. When fascism seems to flourish around us, and when more seem to behave illustrating my-way-or-no-way attitude, and when we seem to wonder where do all these come from, some thoughts should be spared for the little acts of fascism of the home grown variety. At home and in our small offices, on the road and in queues, in the meetings we hold and the discussions we involve in and occasionally lead - these matter. Is not this a paradigm shift we need to promote, espec

English for Running Webinars

    Physical isolation has brought in not just webinars to the academia. It has once again emphasized the need for healthy communication skills. And not just that, it has brought in the need to have reasonable good informal conversational skills. Since English is not our native tongue, we have been fed with a curriculum heavy in formal English communication skills that our students are generally lacking in casual conversation and small talk skills. This is also because English language has been taught more and used less. The infodemic let loose by the pandemic in the form of webinars has put one aspect of this on display. Since many of us were not into online teaching and webinars (in a big way) pre-pandemic, and since our digital information pathways are not capacious enough to bear the brunt of massive connectedness, there are many glitches while we attempt these exercises. An interesting one for me, perhaps because am also what they call a language guy, is the need for some pr