Page 119 - DEDU505_TEACHER_EDUCATION_ENGLISH

Unit 11: Agencies of Teacher Education and their Functions—Academic Staff College

Self Assessment Notes
2. Fill in the blanks
(i) Academic staff colleges are guided by an ........................................ .
(ii) In the initial stages only staff of government colleges and ......................... was encouraged
to attend the programme of academic staff colleges.
(iii) The ................... are of four week duration constituting 144 contact hours for newly appointed
lecturers of the universities an colleges.
(iv) The objective of this programme is to enhance the motivation and general awareness of
teachers and ensure ................... and methodologies.
(v) The .................... are of three week duration constituting 108 contact hours for serving
teachers of universities and colleges.

11.5 Participation in Staff Training Programmes

There are about 5.00 lakh teachers working in higher education system. As already mentioned, to
encourage motivation of teachers participation in the ASC programmes for achieving quality in
higher education, UGC has linked completion of these programmes successfully to career
development and higher pay grades. In the beginning, confirmation of newly appointed lecturers
was tied up with the attendance in an orientation course, latter it was linked with the time-bound
promotion policy. Twenty three years after introduction of the scheme, sixty six Academic Staff
colleges are currently offering programmes of staff development across the country.
Similarly, refresher courses are meant for experienced teachers, either in their own subject or
interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary subjects. A total of about 7992 refresher courses have been
conducted by different ASCs in India. On an average about 336 refresher courses per year were
conducted. Thus there has been consistent growth observed in number of programmes over the
years. Table 4 A depicts the plan wise participation of the teachers in refresher courses. About
2,57,301 participants attended refresher courses training and out of that the number of male and
female participation.
Refresher courses in various subjects are being implemented in a less centralised manner than that
of the orientation courses.
There is no consolidated data available about their activities. At present the number of RCCs is
drastically reduced to about 8-10. Likewise, there is no consolidated data available regarding
workshops/ Professional Development Programmes organized by various ASCs for senior
faculty/administrators, middle level management staff, research scholars, etc.

There were more than 80 other institutions (Refresher course centers) in the
country that have been entrusted the task of organising refresher courses in
different subjects.

11.6 Evaluation of Academic Staff Colleges and concerned Issues

To understand whether the programme is achieving the set objectives and if so to what extent, a
qualitative and quantitative evaluation is needed.
The activities of Academic Staff Colleges and their programmes have been evaluated by University
Grants Commission through expert committees almost after the end of every plan period. However,
no set procedures are defined for the expert committees. It was understood that, these committees
used various criteria like number of programmes organized by the ASC during evaluation period,
types of programmes and their quality, participants feed back, resource persons, evaluation
procedures, funds utilized, etc. Nevertheless, there is no consolidated data or reports available
about the evaluation of ASCs and their programmes by expert committees.

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