HiEd Log

One core characteristic of ACAS was it's incessant effort to lend meaningful experiences to the learners. Placing studied emphasis on involving learners and providing them opportunities in areas where they were often neglected, the college tried to make it more experiential than many others around. A number of initiatives which we came up with has the word 'student' prominently prefixed to it. This occasionally makes people ask why should this be as educational institutions are expected to focus on students. If really that had that been the case, there would never have been an expression like 'student-centred'. Invited Student Talks, International Student Seminars and the like were aimed to lay the stress heavily on students and put them in the lead. 'afterwords, the Annual Students E-journal',  too was launched to let the spotlight fall on them.  The Plan  With Project Quality Cell on the one side, Project Prize on the other and the Publication Wing on yet

Ever since a minor research project was included in the curriculum of undergraduate programs offered by the HEIs, the mandatory student project (the mandatoriness was relaxed later to make it a student choice, I understand) which forms part of the final semester has been a matter of more concern and less praise. Like many moves to bring in added skills and capabilities to the learner and faculty members have been tamed to fit the work ethics of the supervising faculty, the project idea too has been reduced to a printed long essay with embellishments of hard cover and acknowledgements, thinly spread across so many pages. Since a good student project at the undergraduate level can truly enrich the possibilities of better higher studies and careers, we decided to launch the UG Project Prize at ACAS. This was actually modelled on the Dissertation Award which I introduced at Unity Women's College a decade back for the best Postgraduate Dissertations in English at the state level, which

What features next here is an apparently pedestrian entry called Blog. Blogs have been around for long and in a sense their heyday is done with. But the part it can play in promoting skills and feeding growth among the faculty members and learners is still big.  Like many of the technological gadgets, the blog too has a very productive part to play if used wisely. Both student and teacher blogs were part of my scheme of things to inculcate and improve reading and writing skills among them. Interestingly, when I look back, I realise that the teacher blog has worked better than the students blogs!  The Plan  T he plan was ambitious. Many of my plans were like that. You invest energy in an idea and push it forward. Then there is a stage when you breath so much passion into it that the idea begins to take ownership over you and guide you as it kind of trusts it's master. Make the faculty contribute regularly to a blog: that was the simple, original plan. Most of us who are into leading

  Most of the good practices implemented at Al Shifa College of Arts and Science (ACAS) were not isolated, scattered ones, but practices which add to the cohesive vision we were approximating. All arms of the institutional practices fit in to the various threads of the mission statements and aid the realisation of the same. The idea of a Newsletter is neither new or challenging when seen from afar, though the actual execution is a different ball game, the hardest part being bringing it out on time! The Rationale I have introduced newsletters in all the institutions I have involved with in a leadership role. ACAS was just another instance. But what was achieved in my latest leadership outing at ACAS was by far the best because it was beautifully streamlined at all stages and it was brought out regularly and on time. The basic reason for the establishment of a monthly e-newsletter of course is to communicate to the world outside what is happening at the College. Since documentation is

  'Publish and perish' can be an arguable reframing of 'publish or perish' aphorism as low-quality publishing can boomerang. The rat race to have publications in one's credit even when one is neither interested, trained or willing to publish these days is forcing us to attempt the act. The teachers are expected to have good language skills and academic writing capabilities, even though the years spent in colleges and universities may not have given many of us those skill sets. This has a telling impact on the work the faculty members do at the HEIs. With research projects becoming an integral component of the student lives in HEIs, how can they teach what they don't know, forget their competence to publish their research articles? The thought of establishing a Publication Wing at Al Shifa College of Arts and Science (ACAS) arose against the backdrop of such thoughts.  The Rationale It is very ambitious for a small, newly founded degree college to aspire that hig

Of late Al Shifa College of Arts & Science (ACAS) has become often connected to the blended teaching strategy known as Flipped Learning. This is because three months into the launch of the new college under my leadership, we decided to embrace a blended mode of content delivery. There were a number of reasons which drove us to this decision. The college was launched in the midst of the COVID 19 pandemic in the month of September in 2020. Though a good part of the lessons were provided during the period in the online mode, there were spells of offline presences too. A mode of content delivery which is ideal for the period was a blended one and flipped model is what we went for.  The Beginnings: What was prompted to a good extent by the compulsions of the pandemic period was later upgraded to a core practice of ACAS. This was not a decision taken in a hurry or done foreseeing a prolonged persistence of the pandemic situation. The series of discussions I had with the Department Heads