MAPUSA
The Principal of Sridora Caculo College of Commerce and Management Studies, Mapusa, Santosh B Patkar said that it may not be difficult to implement the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP) in the first year in colleges as envisaged by the Directorate of Higher Education but admitted there were challenges like coordinating with the working of ‘cluster of colleges’ concept.
Patkar also said that Goa University was yet to come out with the course structure and there was also a delay in launching the admission portal.
“The focus of NEP is multi-disciplinary subjects. Students are offered a choice to pick subjects outside a particular stream they choose. Colleges which offer multi-disciplinary courses may not face this problem. But it will be a challenge for colleges such as ours which is a single-faculty college,” Patkar opined.
Clubbing colleges
To overcome the problem of such colleges, the NEP has come out with the ‘cluster of colleges’ concept where colleges depending on geographical contiguity will be clubbed together to offer the desired subjects/infra to students.
“The cluster of colleges is yet to be finalised. The colleges which will make a cluster will sign an MoU along with the university,” Patkar said.
He said framing the time-table will be a challenge as institutes will have to coordinate with other colleges.
“Course curriculum will not be a big issue as much as forming a time-table. Coordination in the working of other colleges in the cluster will be a challenge. Secondly, we will have to see how the students will accept the cluster of colleges concept,” he said.
Internship course
According to the Mapusa college principal, providing the internship course during the summer vacation introduced by the new system could also be challenging for the educational institutes.
“To accommodate the students in the internship programme, the institute may have to run a vocational course in summer vacations,” he said.
Admission portal
The immediate problem was fixing of course structure and launching a dedicated portal system for admission.
“The university is yet to release the course structure. Then there is a delay in launching the admission portal. Once the admission procedure is completed, I don’t think there will be much difficulty regarding the implementation of NEP,” he said.
