REPORT ON WORKSHOPS ON EDUCATIONAL MANAGEMENT AND EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY (CONDUCTED AT HYDERABAD AND TIRUPATHI)
MEMBERS AND OFFICERS OF THE ANDHRA PRADESH STATE COUNCIL OF HIGHER
EDUCATION, HYDERABAD (SEPTEMBER 1990)
MEMBERS OF THE STATE COUNCIL:
NAME DESIGNATION DATE OF APPOINTMENT
1. Prof. G.J.V. Jagannadha Raju Chairman 20-05-1988
2. Prof. K. Ramaiah Vice-Chairman 30-10-1989
3. Secretary to Government, Ex-Officio Member 20-05-1988
Education Department, Govt. of Andhra Pradesh,
Hyderabad
4. Secretary to Govt. Ex-Officio Member 20-05-1988
Finance Department
Govt. of Andhra Pradesh, Hyderabad
5. Secretary to Govt. Ex-Officio Member 20-05-1988
Labour, Employment & Tech. Education
Govt. of Andhra Pradesh, Hyderabad
6. Secretary Ex-Officio Member 20-05-1988
University Grants Commission
New Delhi
7. Prof. T. Navaneeth Rao Eminent Educationist 17-09-1988
8. Prof. K. Venkata Reddy Eminent Educationist 17-09-1988
9. Prof. R. Srinivasa Rao Eminent Educationist 17-09-1988
10. Prof. B.V. Kishan Eminent Educationist 17-09-1988
11. Sri M.R. Krishnaiah Represents Industry 17-09-1988
12. Dr. B. Swamy Nominee of State Govt. 17-09-1988
13. Prof. Jafar Nizam Nominee of State Govt. 17-09-1988
14. Prof. K. Koteswara Rao Nominee of State Govt. 17-09-1988
(Technical Expert)
OFFICERS OF THE STATE COUNCIL:
1. Prof. G.J.V. Jagannadha Raju Chairman 20-05-1988
2. Prof. K. Ramaiah Vice-Chairman 30-10-1989
3. Sri Ch. Venkateswara Rao Secretary 23-08-1988
4. Sri Syed Tahseen Hussain Asst. Secretary 29-08-1990
PREFACE
The Andhra Pradesh State Council of Higher Education arranged two workshops in September, 1990 on topics extremely relevant to Higher Education in Nineties. One is on the Management of Higher Education and the other is on Educational Technology. These two workshops were organised with the collaboration of Loughborough University of Technology, U.K. with Andhra Pradesh State Council of Higher Education. The response to the workshops from the participants drawn from all the Universities in the State was very encouraging and the participants could get an insight into the intricacies of management and the exciting prospects of media-assisted learning in Educational Technology. The report contains presentations by the Minister for Higher Education and Prof. S.K.Khanna, Vice- Chairman, University Grants Commission and others. In addition material prepared by experts from Loughborough University for distribution to the participants is included. It is hoped that workshops of this nature would help periodically updating knowledge in the field of higher education management and educational technology. The Council places on record the unstinted cooperation extended to it by the British Council, Loughborough University, Vice-Chancellors of Osmania University and A.P.Open University and all other academics who contributed to the success of the workshops.
The Council is also thankful to the Vice-Chancellor, Sri Venkateswara University and the off ice-bearers of Tirupati Chapter of Indian Society for Technical Education for arranging a workshop for the faculty of the Engineering Colleges in the State at Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati.
PROF. G.J.V. JAGANNADHA RAJU
CHAIRMAN
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WELCOME ADDRESS by
Prof. G.J.V. Jagannadha Raju,
Chairman
Andhra Pradesh State Council of Higher Education
Hon'ble Minister for Higher Education, Sri Janardhana Reddy, Prof. Khanna, Vice-Chairman, University Grants Commission, Prof. Andrew Wilson, Director, Staff Development and Training, Loughborough University of Technology, Sri P.K.Doraiswamy, Principal Secretary, Education, Vice-Chancellors, Dr. David Mack and Mr. Peter Allison of loughborough University distinguished invitees, Participants of the Workshop and members of the Press and media.
It gives me great pleasure to welcome you all to this very important function which is enriched by the distinguished presence of Hon'ble Minister for Higher Education and Vice-Chairman of the University Grants Commission. At the outset, we thank the Hon'ble Minister for Higher Education for consenting to inaugurate the two workshops, one on "Management of Higher Education" and the other on "Education Technology". Sir, we are aware of your excellent insight into the Education System in Andhra Pradesh and we are grateful that you could spare some time for us in your busy schedule.
Within a few days of assuming charge, your direct interaction with Vice-Chancellors of the Universities, Principal Secretary, Education and the State Council of Higher Education reveals your interest and commitment to the development of higher education in Andhra Pradesh. We extent a very special welcome to you.
We are grateful to you, Prof. S.K.Khanna, for consenting to give the "Key-Note Address". You have been a source of unfailing inspiration to the State Council of Higher Education by guiding the Council through your active participation in Council meetings.
We rejoice in your appointment as Vice-Chairman, and let me extend a very cordial welcome to you. I am sure with your understanding and appreciation of higher education system in Andhra Pradesh, you would continue to guide and help the Council and the State Universities. We thank you for your guidance In helping Telugu University to get admission for Central Assistance and issue of financial sanctions the very next day. The State Council of Higher Education an) the Universities in the State, assure you Sirs, Hon'ble Minister for Higher Education and U.G.C. that we on our part would do our best for the development of Higher Education system in the State with the assistance of the U.G.C.
Let me also welcome Dr. Andrew Wilson and his team from Britain who have come a long way to share their expertise with us.
To Prof. Navaneeth Rao and Prof. Chandrasekhara Rao who are collaborators in the programme, I extend a warm welcome.
Let me also extend a very hearty welcome to Vice- Chancellors, senior professors and participants form various universities in the State.
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Now a word about the Workshops: On the British Council's initiative, and with the State Council's consent, and by mutual discussions, Loughborough University has been identified as a centre of excellence for staff development programmes for establishing an Academic Link Exchange. The State Government has supported the programme. In effect, it is an Academic Link Programme between the Loughborough University and Universities in A.P.State to be monitored through the Andhra Pradesh State Council of Higher Education. Prof. Andrew Wilson has been identified as the coordinator from U.K. side to interact with the Chairman, Andhra Pradesh State Council of Higher Education. As part of the Council's initiative to undertake staff training and development programmes to increase efficiency in teaching and optimal utilisation and sharing of resources two workshops have been planned. The workshop on "education Management" deals with planning, co-ordination and time-management. The workshop on "Education Technology" is meant to officer training in Audio-Visual techniques to the participants with the latest audio visual devices, and their use to enhance skill levels of production staff. Altogether 50 Academics are participating in these workshops. In addition to the three U.K.experts from Loughborough University, Experts are drawn from U.G.C., NIEPA and Universities as resource persons. The knowledge gained by participants is expected to be transmitted to teachers in the affiliated colleges. By the end of the programme, each University will have atleast one to two faculty members who would be trained in these workshops and at least one member will visit U.K. to study for a month their technologies.
I am sure the programme envisaged under this Academic Link Exchange will be of mutual benefit for both parties in terms of sharing of knowledge. We are hoping that this entire effort would lead to long term support from ODA for intensive training in Educational Technology. While we once again welcome all of you, I express, on behalf of State Council, Osmania University and A.P.Open University, my gratitude to the Hon'ble Minister for Higher Education for accepting our invitation to inaugurate the workshop and for consenting to preside, to Prof. S.K.Khanna, for his acceptance to deliver the Key Note Address, to Dr. Andrew Wilson and his team for preparing the course material and for agreeing to direct the workshops, and to Sri P.K.Doraiswamy, for his continued guidance in organising these workshops.
THANK YOU
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INAUGURAL ADDRESS by
Sri N. JANARDHANA REDDY
Minister for Higher Education
I am happy to be associated this morning with the inauguration of Workshops on Educational Management and Educational Technology organised by A. P. State Council of Higher Education in Collaboration with Loughborough University, UK and Osmania University and A.P. Open University. The advance of the tide of numbers in the Higher Education Sector is making it Increasingly difficult to recruit teachers with requisite scholarship and to provide necessary physical facilities. The audio-visual aids of modern era would certainly be able to help us overcome these deficiencies In a substantial measure provided they are effectively put to use. My experience has been that costly equipment provided to institutions of learning and hospitals etc., at considerable expense and sacrifice urgently required for developmental programmes are mainly there as status symbols. Very frequently, not even the crates have been opened and the equipment Is allowed to rust unused. It is earnestly hoped that this workshop on Educational Technology will be a significant step in giving substance to our educational programmes carried out within the confines,of our classrooms but also to make it a meaningful experience to those participating in our distance education programmes.
Critics have expressed dissatisfaction with existing procedures, techniques and methods employed in the management of education which is indeed a complex process even in normal times. This Is especially so in a world facing the accelerated thrust of forces of change in every walk of life. I earnestly hope that with a continuous interchange of experiences not only among Universities of our State but with those abroad would help in rapid modernisation of educational management.
After assumption of charge of Higher Education, I had extensive discussions with the individual Vice-Chancellors and am vastly benefitted by their discussions. I am happy that I am immediately given this opportunity to meet the distinguished members of the academic fraternity in a group. I lay no claim to be an educationist, but as an individual, I have been observing with growing concern the paradoxical situation of frequent changes of policies in education and a near stagnant educational system, which is swelling the ranks of educated unemployed. I place this anguish of mine before you so that you may debate and refine and revise our plans of education for improving the employability of our young boys and girls.
Eighty percent of our parents are not educated and are poor. We cannot expect them to plan their education. At tremendous personal sacrifice, they can only send boys and girls to schools and colleges hoping that it would be a passport for a better tomorrow. Obvious of this need, our educational system is churning out thousands of unemployable graduates. True we have been making sporadic attempts at giving a vocational or job orientation to our curricula. But these efforts lack coherence and continuity.
We have only to look at what is happening in Intermediate education sector for the last 15 years. The boy who comes through Telugu medium, and unable to get admission in Sciences or arts, is admitted to vocational stream where instruction is imparted through English medium only. While the boys of academic streams study english for eight hours a week, the academically low achievers of vocational stream study the subject for four hours a week, But both are expected to study the same books and appear for the same examination. What academic improbabilities we are practicing in the name of vocationalisation of our educational syllabi for the last 15 years I only hope
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that such a situation is not prevailing in undergraduate and postgraduate core sectors. This is where I was discussing with our Secretary the other day and we thought of a core Committee to look into this and advise us.
With U.G.C. making generous allocation of funds for introduction of restructured courses, there is every danger of new courses of study being selected without any concern for its relevance. The restructured courses should not become another cosmetic change in a colonial system of education handed over to us. While Britishers have since then brought in radical transformation in their educational objectives, instructional programmes and evaluation procedures etc,, we are where we were 50 years ago.
A lay man like me can only feel the pulse of the society and say that all is not well with our educational programmes. I can only demand changes but, in which direction the changes must take place, is left to you, the leaders of the academic community to decide. It is for this the society has readily granted to you autonomy in a measure not granted to any other public activity.
It is only in education you have a right to determine your targets or goals. You have a right to select programmes or procedures to achieve these goals and evaluation models to measure the achievement of the same. I do strongly cherish these ideals of autonomy. But let us not forget that autonomy put, tremendous responsibility on you. The concept of autonomy can be Successful only to the extent there is awareness of the concomitant responsibility.
This Government is committed to the concept of autonomy. This Government is committed to the growth of academic excellence. This Government is also committed to the welfare of the teacher, who is the sheet anchor of national prosperity. The talented and committed teacher irrespective of his caste, region, language and religion to which he belongs will have to be spotted, fostered and given higher academic and administrative responsibilities. Unfortunately this is not happening. Other extraneous considerations like caste, and religion etc., are making their presence felt in a very large measure in the selection of teachers for even the offices of Vice-Chancellors. It is unfortunate that Universities, which should foster the growth and transmission of higher standards of culture and citizenship should become hot beds of caste, regional and linguistic politics. These can be overcome only by self-discipline among the members of the reaching community.
These educational issues of great relevance have engaged the attention of our young and dynamic leader, Sri Rajiv Gandhiji. Even while he was facing challenging political situations of unprecedented dimensions, the initiated a national dialogue on various aspects of education. All year-long debate resulted in the formulation of a national policy on education. This policy is the result of interaction among people of various walks of life and has far reaching consequences in our march towards prosperity. Let us first Implement it in its totality; Monitor the progress of Implementation, and based on the feed-back, we may continue the dialogue. It should be a continuous dialogue to start another evaluation and another policy.
The State Council of Higher Education is one of the offshoots of this comprehensive national policy of education. I am happy today that our State Council of higher education has started a collaborative project. I have to thank the British Council and Loughborough University, U.K., for accepting to work with our State Council of Higher Education. I hope they will share their valuable experiences with us and I hope useful and successful programmes will be launched which will be of benefit to the State.
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Presidential Address by
Sri P.K Doraiswamy
Principal Secretary to Government Education Department,
Government of Andhra Pradesh
As the Chairman of this function I had the choice of making either the opening remarks or the closing remarks. But with any audience closing remarks are always more popular. So I chose to make the closing remarks. After listening to the Minister, Mr. Wilson, Mr. Khanna and Prof. Raju, and particularly since the audience Is mostly of people who spent a lifetime In the field of education, it will be presumptions on my part to talk anything about education. But still, to make the Chairman's function a little dignified, it is may duty to make one or two points.
Well, I am a civil servant, some people call me a bureaucrat but civil servant sounds better. Civil servants generally do not have much faith in training. They believe that experience otherwise called seniority is everything. There is always reluctance on the part of Government servant to attend training programmes, I was also like that. But then, suddenly, enlightenment dawned on me one day when I was with my parents on vacation. In my house, as in any others there is a problem of finding a good cook. Cooks keep on coming and going. Nobody stays on long enough. But then I noticed even if cooks come and go the quality of food never changed quality remained very high. Then I realised that it was training of my mother that mattered and not the cooks coming and going.
In other words I realised that what training means is the institutionalisation of excellence. Excellence should not come and go with people. It should be institutionalised. That Is happening everywhere with your mother, with your father, perhaps with your friend, it is happening all the time and we see it all the time getting built into the organisation. So this is really one of objectives of any one of the training programmes. I remember when I attended an All India Level Conference of Education Ministers, and Secretaries, over two years ago when I was in the same job, one of the experts who got up to speak said "everything is O.K. with education. In fact everything is excellent except two things Teachers do not teach and students do not study." It sounds a little tragicomical. But I have a feeling that this gentleman forgot to mention one thing more, students should not only study and teachers should not only teach but teachers should also study. When a teacher acts as a model before a student, the most important function of a teacher, according to me, Is to present a live model to the student to follow; unless he himself projects a good model to the student what moral authority has he got to tell the student to study? Infact when I was invited to deliver a talk in one of the academic staff colleges, I seriously suggested to them that students should come and see how the academic staff colleges are functioning. They should see how their own teachers convert themselves into students and how good students they are. It will definitely have some kind of an impact that a teacher is not merely exercising the disciplinary authority over the students but he is trying to exercise academic or intellectual authority. For that, students should really watch teachers functioning as students. I will close by mentioning one Incident which I happened to read somewhere and it has something to do with U.K. I believe King George VI visited EATON, the very famous school (It is not etiquette for anybody to wear his Hat in the presence of His Majesty) when the headmaster was about to remove his hat, King George VI told him "it is true that in my presence everybody, removes his hat. But in this school you are the boss. I am a visitor. Your keep the Hat oil," in the presence of all the students. That was symbolic of the importance given to a person in the teaching profession by the Head of the State. When I attended All India Conference on education in Delhi, at
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which Prof. Kothari, the Guru of Education was also to speak, Several of the speakers spoke for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, or half an hour whereas Prof. Kothari spoke only for one minute.
He said, "I know only three things about our education there is nothing Indian about it, nobody takes it seriously; it has no value". Having listen to that speech, it takes real courage for you to speak for more than One minute on education in any forum.
There is a feeling, probably justified, that even though some institutions do manage to attain academic excellence; social and moral values are not getting inculcated into the younger generation and perhaps even the older generation, if I may say so and this is an important aspect which some of us think will come automatically to the student. There was a time when even if the teachers neglected it, the parents contributed something. Now the parents depend on the teachers and the teachers depend on the parents with the result that the student is left himself to frame his own values. As somebody said, "in the olden days in the schools, teachers used to say, Come to (he school; we will teach you the three R's. Today the teachers seem to say don't learn 3 R's. We will teach you only 2 R's - "Rastha Rokha". So this is the kind of values people are picking up. When I visited Andhra University, Waltair, I happened to listen to some lady delivering a talk on ramayana in Sanskrit. She made as Interesting observation that while a well-educated man in Sanskrit is referred to as "Sakshra", if people don't have values it gets reversed and it becomes "Rakshasa". The value system has to be build into the daily interaction with the students when we teach. So these are some of the things I wanted to place before you. It has been a privilege for me to participate in this function organised by the State Council. Prof. Khanna has been a good fiend of the State Council, infact inspite of being very busy as the Secretary and key executive of the U.G.C., he has never missed a meeting of the State Council. In fact, he is such an informal person that left to himself, even as Vice-Chairman of U.G.C. he would like to come and attend the meetings, but only protocol stands in the way. So it is a pleasure for me to meet him again on this occasion and to involve him in this function and I have no doubt at all that inspite of his new elevated position, he will continue to give his guidance and support to the State Council.
I would like to thank the Minister, the Vice-Chairnan of the U.G.C., the U.K. experts and all others who have participated in this function.
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KEY-NOTE ADDRESS