275 engineering colleges seek closure

Adarsh Jain

Coimbatore:





TN, AP Top List In Country

A total of 275 engineering colleges across the country have applied for closure this year, said the chairman of All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) Anil D Sahasrabuddhe in Coimbatore on Friday . Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh top the list of states with the highest number of institutions that have come forward to close down.

“Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh have more such institutions than other states,“ Sahasrabuddhe said. In the past two years, the AICTE has been actively working on reducing the quantity of engineering institutions across the country . The regulatory body had also reduced the penalty for closing down an engineering institution that remained a deterrent for many colleges who were willing to shut in the midst of poor demand.

Sahasrabuddhe was in Coimbatore to inaugurate a teacher training programme on e-learning at Sri Krishna College of Engineering and Technology . An initiative of the AICTE under the Union ministry of human resource and development, the teacher training programme is a pan-India exercise.

“A total of eight programmes are being conducted wherein we train faculty members from selected institutions on e-learning. These faculty members will in turn train their colleagues at their respective institutions,“ the director of AICTE Mandeep Singh Manna said.

The teacher training programme aims at equipping faculties of engineering institutions for using digital platforms like Study Webs of Active-Learning for Young Aspiring Minds (SWAYAM) for higher education. “There are about 280 subjects in SWAYAM so far and about 350 subjects are ready to be introduced. We are looking at having 2,000 subjects in the next two years,“ said the chairman of AICTE.

The Union ministry of human resource and development has passed a regulation to introduce choicebased credit system where a student is allowed to choose courses of his choice from SWAYAM and earn credits for it.

Faculty members from institutions across the country are working or preparing the modules for each subject.“Anyone interested has to first send a three-minute video to us about the module which will be scrutinized by an expert committee. Thereafter, we will decide if the faculty member can be allowed to prepare the module for that particular subject,“ said Sahasrabuddhe.

Asked if faculty members will get credits during appraisal for preparing a module for SWAYAM, he said, “We will introduce it in the appraisal system soon.Anybody who has taken efforts to prepare a module should be rewarded for it.“