UGC Guidelines for Establishment of Education Departments in Multidisciplinary Institutions

Abstract

The NEP 2020, has suggested several policy directions for offering multidisciplinary education, as well as to establish Department of Education in such institutions. This Holistic and Multidisciplinary Education underlines pulling of courses and resources from a variety of disciplines and helping in the holistic individual development including social and life skills. The purpose of this type of Education according to NEP policy is to link the teaching-learning process with life, community and the world of work including the environment across all disciplines/fields of study as well as STEM education. The ‘Education Departments’ are visualized as instruments towards contributing to multidisciplinary teaching-learning (curriculum, pedagogy, technology-enabled blended learning, assessment and evaluation, etc.) as visualized in the NEP 2020 and develop specialized expert in these areas. The present article has described in detail the entire procedure of establishing the ‘Department of Education’ in Multidisciplinary Institutions in terms of present and proposed Structural Arrangement; Functions and Programmes; Linkage to HEI’s as well as the operationalization of the NEP 2020 policies in this regard. Thus, the Education Departments of universities and colleges need to comprehensively focus on this task of merging. The UGC Guidelines for Transforming HEI’s into Multidisciplinary Institutions concluded with a statement that the micro-details/functions during the process of implementation may be worked out subsequently.