HiEd Log

College where each one of the faculty members has a website of her/his own is a rarity. Neither is it mandatory to be that way. Unless the need can be justified strongly, there is no rationale to argue in favour of this. I don't think the digital presence and footprints will grow so exponentially that each professional will need to have one personal website. But many professionals who take themselves seriously create permanent, impressionable presences on the world wide web as it improves their visibility and showcases their activities and achievements. My efforts at ACAS have been to impress upon each member of the faculty community that they are professionals who take themselves and their career development seriously. Hence the idea to make the faculty members find their early digital foothold with at least personal Googlesites. Since ACAS had established an ecosystem which promotes sustained faculty professional development with a suite of programmes addressing the promotion of ...

To make faculty members read is one of the biggest challenges. It needs no debate whether faculty should read or not. A teacher who doesn't read is a teacher who doesn't grow. And a teacher who doesn't grow can by extension create generation of learners who are left behind. This is extremely damaging in the long run and it is reflected at multiple levels in the performance of the faculty members too. For the emotional and intellectual growth of both the teacher and the learner, it is important the teacher keeps grounded and connected. Reading helps achieve that. This explains the decision to make an effort to encourage reading among the faculty members. To the number of Continuous Professional Development initiatives, one more was added: 'My Reading: Teachers' Reading Experiences'  The Plan  The general gut feeling is that majority of the faculty members in HEIs are not good readers. Or perhaps they couldn't find time to read what they would love to. As we a...

The Higher Education scene is increasingly becoming a flat world, it looks like! When all colleges offer all services and have all facilities and run all activities and have all collaborations and provide all competencies, it has got to be a levelled world with all HEIs equally  of high quality. No bumps on the graph. State-of-the-art seems to be the state of minimum affairs. As a person who always keeps an eye on what other educational institutions are upto, it amazes me how much all the HEIs are collectively doing. This is reflected through the material shared on the social media as posters and reels and statuses.  The scene has never been so vibrant if one is to go by the poster-reel scenario. Each year there is an increase in promotional activities by the HEIs pointing to the rising competition and perhaps also reflecting the slow fall in enrollment. Each year it is possible to spot even new institutions which so far considered themselves in an elite category (and hence ...

While going through the entry level requirements for a summer school programme offered by an International University, it was found that they ask about the publications of the applicant. Discussing the same, one aspirant asked me, how it was possible for an undergraduate student to have publications. Weren't publications meant for postgrads and research scholars?, she, a UG student, asked. I said then that at the college where I worked, there were students who walked out with Publication at the end of their graduation. When I said so, I was referring to the Interdisciplinary Insights project which we successfully launched at ACAS.  The seriousness with which ACAS approached the student projects had resulted in a number of outcomes. As I have commented in a couple of my previous posts, it is often the realisation of certain targets which made us raise the bar and dream bigger. Since we established a Project Quality Cell (PQC), there was increased awareness among the faculty members...

A participant in a faculty empowerment programme recently approached me during the lunch break and told me that it was the second session of mine she was attending. Following on my first session, she had attempted giving tasks and running flipped classes a couple of times and as majority of the learners showed little interest, she has kind of given it all up, she said. Her tribe is in fact quite large since we often lack the patience to work through the no-outcome zone and rush back to embrace the default comfort zones. This is what James Clears calls the inability to 'break through the 'plateau of latent potential' in his book 'Atomic Habits'. He rightly says it's common for people to "make a few small changes, fail to see a tangible result, and decide to stop". This being the start of an academic year, this can as well be the right moment to realistically set modest academic new year resolutions for teachers so that they can align their game with the...