Delhi University may allow 40% of courses to go online as UGC’s Swayam listed for tomorrow’s Academic Council meet

The UGC had also asked the higher education institutions to devise a framework for credit transfer and integration with existing programmes. DU’s commerce department may be the first to implement the Swayam online courses for the semester.

Pointing out the disadvantages which the move might create in the structure of higher education, several teachers expressed that this item might be opposed by several elected Academic Council members on Thursday.

Pankaj Garg, who teaches Mathematics at Rajdhani College, told The Indian Express that online education will not be of much help for students to make the initial basic concepts clear until they come to college and interact with teachers and students. If this item gets passed in the Thursday’s AC meeting, this will adversely affect the education system, Garg asserted, adding that the move can be applied for a temporary arrangement but not for a permanent mode of teaching.

“We had already witnessed that the model of online teaching was not really of much help during the pandemic. This can be used to accommodate classes for additional courses for students such as the Value Added Courses to cater to the low infrastructure facilities available to accommodate students on campus but not for regular curriculum,” Garg said.

Earlier, the Academics for Action and Development Delhi Teachers Association had also opposed the move. “Amidst this pandemic, UGC has come out with a public notice dated 20 May 2021, suggesting that it may soon allow 40 per cent of any course through online mode. AAD strongly opposes this public notice of UGC. The online classes as a replacement of on-campus classes are not feasible due to lack of infrastructure and equipment with the majority of students…This will adversely affect our training and harm the interest of the nation being a world leader. Earlier, the criteria was tweaked so that more and more universities can offer 100% online degrees. On the shoulders of COVID 2.0, the bullets of fund cut and teaching- job-cut has been fired. This is not a scheme of blended mode of teaching, rather a ‘blended mode of implementing privatisation and contractualisation as envisaged in NEP’. This will drastically reduce the workload and thus, displacing adhoc and temporary teachers. We demand absorption of the ad hoc and temporary teachers,” it said in an earlier statement.

Pointing out how this move will become a threat to the jobs of teachers in the university, elected Academic Council member Maya John and a faculty at Jesus and Mary College said, “Most of the elected AC members are going to oppose and record a dissent on this issue. Classroom teaching is very important for many students who come from different backgrounds and this will also impact the need for teaching staff who will be substituted by online learning on Swayam,” she said.

John further added that incorporating such an initiative might also lead to jobs being denied, a threat to courses not being up to date and the quality of the content that is being taught to go down.

“It is practically not possible to ask departments to move from the designed course structure to a structure to prepare courses to cater to the online mode,” she said.