Mumbai, April 24

The Vice-Chancellor of Amity University at Gurugram, P B Sharma, believes that the Covid-19 lockdown has been a misfortune but it is providing positive outcomes for Indian universities. The fear of poor-quality online teaching and the hesitation on the part of faculty members to use online portals have now completely disappeared.

Sharma, who has also been the past President of Association of Indian Universities, in an interview with BusinessLine , shared his views about running universities in times of a pandemic. Excerpts:

Is there a need for the management to change its perspective about universities’ functioning and deployment of courses?

In the education sector, our immediate priority during the lockdown and thereafter in Indian universities should be to utilise Information Technology to create an advantageous position for 666 million young Indians who are below 25 years of age.

The management efforts should be towards maximum utilisation of online systems to prepare our students not only for the immediate task of completing the course work for the current academic year but also to look beyond and prepare the workforce for tomorrow’s knowledge-intensive and technology-driven work environment.

It goes without saying that in the coming years, working from home, sharing the workforce time for multiple tasks, and even working for multiple employers, may become a reality for a greater proportion of professionals. This would also necessitate a radical change in the way we offer education in our universities and prepare them for the rapidly changing knowledge and skill needs of the industry and corporates.

The experience gained from online classes, workforce-training programmes and managing of tasks and activities of the university during the Covid crisis should pave the way for redesigning India’s higher education for tomorrow’s industries, corporate and business enterprises as also to build responsible global citizenship.

What are the lessons for universities from the lockdown?

The lockdown has come as a blessing in disguise for the universities in India. The fear of poor quality of online teaching and teachers’ hesitation to use online portals have now completely disappeared. It is heartening to know that teachers have taken up online teaching with great interest. Digitally-proficient students are going for online learning with great excitement.

In the days of collaborative learning, it becomes all the more important to use IT online platforms to facilitate pooling of brains and creating an environment that promotes team learning. Digital learning has greatly facilitated this aspect of knowledge acquisition.

Today, online teaching and learning are a reality and should be fully integrated into the university system. The universities of tomorrow have to strengthen their knowledge and IT infrastructure to be future-ready for Covid-like situations. The online teaching pedagogy should focus on collaborative learning and quality of e-resources.

The quality of internet, affordability of high-speed connectivity and security of e-portals have emerged as major issues for the immediate attention of the government and the service providers.

The universities in India, as well as other countries, now need to focus on the effective integration of classroom and laboratory-based teaching with classes, workshop, seminars, and brainstorming in an online mode. It is also important that both teachers and students take up the task of creating a more professionally-oriented teaching-learning environment during the conduct of online classes and other online activities.

Amity University has evolved suitable guidelines for the effective conduct of online classes and to maintain decorum and the sanctity of the teaching-learning environment.

During the lockdown period, how is Amity supporting its registered students who are campus residents as well as those learning through distance education mode?

Amity University has been more fortunate than many other universities as it has taken up the online initiative well ahead of the Covid crisis. It has created the Amity Future Academy to train its faculty to use digital learning platforms like Microsoft Teams and integrate them with the Amity intranet portal ‘Amizone’ on which the entire teaching-learning and academic governance of Amity University are mounted.

Due to this initiative, teachers have been, from March 14, conducting online classes with great ease for all the registered students of under-graduate and post-graduate courses. The central control team at Amity University closely monitors the online conduct of classes and other academic activities. Students’ attendance in online classes is about 95 per cent.

Teachers have made the online teaching more interesting by featuring guest lectures from industry and corporates, alongside regular learning, to connect the students, making them aware of the contemporary and future needs of the industry.

Is the university conducting any free and open online courses in the form of open educational resource (OER)?

At Amity, we consider it important to go beyond our highly innovative curriculum to engage our students in open learning. For this endeavour, we have created open learning areas within the university. Our students are utilising open e-resources made available by Union Ministry of Human Resources Development and also the globally available educational resources.

During the current lockdown, while working from home, we have also put together a series of webinar sessions on Microsoft Team wherein we have been able to rope in eminent experts from the industry to share their thoughts on current and future needs of skilled manpower and technologies.

Has this difficult time made your university explore unbeaten paths, gauge unexplored strengths of faculty skill sets and the use of technology?

Working from home has given us in the university administration an opportunity to engage our faculty not only in online classes by also to sustain their continued interest in research and development.

Our teachers are not only conducting online classes and other academic activities but also have significantly enhanced their interest in research, and their capabilities to bid for funded R&D programmes. During March and April, the faculty filed 10 patents, published 35 research papers and received R&D funding for four new major projects. We also created communities of common interest and found that there is an upsurge in the creativity of our faculty and students.

How do you plan to hold the examination of those students whose exams have been withheld due to the lockdown?

The conduct of examinations is now a major challenge for universities in India if the lockdown continues beyond May 3. We hope that the universities would be able to conduct the end-semester examinations that are already delayed by two weeks.

However, in the eventuality of the lockdown continuing beyond May 3, at Amity, we shall conduct examinations online for which we are working to create a secured platform.

The question papers for such an examination will be set in a manner to assess the capabilities of the students to apply knowledge as also to judge their comprehensive understanding of the subject matter. The priority here will be the final-year students who are to join the job market from June-July onwards.

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