A National Higher Education Qualifications Framework is welcome, but the UGC must remove all the confusion around it
specify frameworks for higher education qualification
1 Even though the movement to specify frameworks for higher education qualifications
had gained momentum across the world in the late 1990s,
2 But India remained without a National Higher Education Qualifications Framework (NHEQF) until recently.
3 University Grants Commission (UGC)
The idea was taken in 60th meeting of the Central Advisory Board of Education in 2012, which assigned the responsibility to the University Grants Commission (UGC).
4 UGC must remove all the confusion about higher education qualifications, which arise because of the multiplicity of guidelines, frameworks and documents in the country.
The problem of plenty
Globally, higher education qualification frameworks
It include details of the definition and requirements of credits.
The UGC has chosen to prescribe two separate frameworks — the National Higher Education Qualifications Framework NHEQF and the National Credit Framework.
Higher educational institutions
1 are separately required to implement the Academic Bank of Credits as a mandated modality for recognising, accepting, and transferring credits across courses and institutions.
Academic Bank of Credits (ABC)
is a virtual/digital storehouse that contains the information of 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.
2 Additionally, there are many other regulations that impinge टकराव on higher education qualifications.
3 All of these could have been integrated into the National Higher Education Qualifications Framework.
4 After all, a qualification framework must minimise ambiguities in comprehending qualifications in a cross-cultural context.
national higher education qualification
must encompass all disciplines and must clearly provide for the eligibility conditions for the entry into, and completion of, all programmes of studies.
The NHEQF does provide exit requirements
1 but eligibility conditions and pathways through which a student can enter a programme at a particular level are alluded to vaguely.
2 Besides, higher education qualifications awarded by disciplines such as agriculture, law, medicine, and pharmacy are conspicuous विशिष्ट by their absence.
3 These disciplines may be under the jurisdiction of separate regulators, but they could have been included in the NHEQF through consensus across various regulatory bodies.
India proactively seeks to remove all mark of its colonial past
it is strange that this document draws by copying from the Bologna process that led to the European Qualifications Framework and the Dublin descriptors.
The higher education system in India is far more diverse and complex than the European Higher Education Area.
It warrants much wider and more intense consultations with the States.
Doing this could have substantially enriched the NHEQF.
The Dublin descriptors are the ‘learning outcomes’.
The Indian higher education system could have benefited
from those experiences and processes, but those outcomes may not be easy to replicate in this country. Most importantly, the European higher education reforms happened some two decades ago.
The document fails to recognise that learning and knowledge must go beyond earning a livelihood.
Education is not only about an individual’s learning capacities and capabilities; sociocultural and politico-economic factors also determine learning.
The overall framework appears to facilitate ‘degrees within a degree’
1 Those who hold four-year undergraduate degrees with a minimum CGPA of 7.5 are eligible for admission to PhD programmes.
2 This will make the higher education system elitist / a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society
3 After all, merit is a social construct; the academic performance of students is invariably mediated by their socioeconomic conditions.
Difficulties in implementation in NHEQF
कोर्स कितने साल में कंप्लीट होगा कन्फ्यूजन वाला है ?
The document places all higher education qualifications on a continuum अबाध क्रम of 4.5 to 10
The framework equates postgraduate diplomas with four-year undergraduate programmes.
This poses a problem in determining the level of such undergraduate degrees that are pursued after another undergraduate degree, like B.Ed. Further, the idea that a B.Ed could be completed in one, two or four years is confusing.
The credit framework document of the UGC
mandates that each semester must have a minimum of 20 credits.
This document suggests that one credit must comprise 15 hours of direct and 30 hours of indirect teaching.
This means that students are required to study for a minimum of 900 hours per semester or close to 10 hours a day.
This is ambitious even for fully residential higher educational institutions. Higher educational institutions with minimal infrastructure and meagre faculty resources may find this daunting.
डबलिन वर्णनकर्ताओं से उदारतापूर्वक उधार लिए गए सीखने के परिणामों का रहस्य अनसुलझा है।
चाहे सामान्य हो या किसी अनुशासन के लिए विशिष्ट, सीखने के परिणाम विभिन्न विषयों में काफी भिन्न हो सकते हैं।
इसके अलावा, उन्हें सभी विषयों में एक ही पैमाने पर नहीं मापा जा सकता है।
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