Following is an excerpt from a report in Times of India.
The MSC Ed, an integrated six-year course (12 semesters), introduced in 2008 is the right way to master teaching skills. Offering quality teacher education programmes is the Regional Institute of Education that include innovative pre-service and in-service teacher training programmes and relevant research, development and extension activities.
The institute started as Regional College of Education in 1963, changed the name in 1994. It is one of the five such institutions established by the National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT), New Delhi. The other institutes are located at Ajmer, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar and Shilong.
Prior to the six-year course, there was a two-year MSC Ed course for those who had completed BSC Ed, said Regional Institute of Education Principal GT Bhandage. "It had a good response and the students from all over the country would appear for the entrance exam. This course was conceived essentially to meet the demand of the higher secondary level in specific subjects like physics, chemistry and mathematics. Students who have passed out from this course were absorbed by Navodaya and Kendriya Vidyalaya," added Bhandage.
In 2008, MSC Ed course was introduced after completion of II PUC or equivalent. The idea was to catch them young and train them with pedagogic skills and develop adequate content competency crucial to a teacher education programme, said Bhandage.
The six years integrated course is a combination of BSc and MSC. The first four years, students study physics, chemistry and mathematics while in fifth and final year they can choose a specialization subject.
After completion of the course one can get into Higher Secondary Schools or can do research.
… The admissions are made on all India basis through an entrance exam. The selection will be based on the performance in the qualifying exam and entrance exam.
For details log on to www.riemysore.ac.in or call 514515/ 2514095.
RIE Mysore has a website at www.riemysore.ac.in. I have not been able to find a web site for RIE Bhubaneswar. I wonder if RIE Bhubaneswar offers such a course.
Considering the implementation of RTE, there is a big need for more and better trained teachers and educational administrators (headmasters, principals, vice-principals, etc.). To achieve that the government of India should upgrade the RIEs to National Institutes of Education and make them Institutions of National Importance. This will attract the attention of more good students towards a teaching and teaching administration career. The government should incraese the number of seats and number of programs in these institutes and intrdoce programs for creating top-notch Educational administrators.
April 14th, 2010
The recent news of an XIMB campus in Balangir adds a new dimension to Balangir’s knowledge infrastructure. As per the recent Business Standard report:
The XIMB campus at Bolangir will exclusively focus on the Rural Management Programme and will have an intake of 120 students.
“Our campus at Bolangir will be a fully residential facility with a built-up area of 1.55 lakh sq ft and it will only offer the Post Graduate Diploma course in Rural Management. We will phase out the Rural Management programme at our existing campus in Bhubaneswar after the establishment of the Bolangir campus”, Joseph added.
XIMB’s campus will come up about seven km from Bolangir town and the institute wants to offer a rural ambience to the students pursuing the Post Graduate Diploma in Rural Management.
XIM should aim to have this institute at the level of IRMA, Anand and put Balangir in the map with respect to rural management institutes. It should rank among the top 3-5 in the country.
Several other knowledge initiatives with respect to Balangir are also in the pipeline. This includes:
- A university and
- a WODC sponsored medical college.
There is also possibility that the state government may make some more state engineering colleges and Balangir should and would be a prime candidate for that.
Besides the above plans, some of the existing higher education institutions in Balangir are:
- Rajendra College, Balangir
- Govt. College Balangir
- Govt. Women’s College Balangir
- BB Sanskrit College, Balangir
- Food Craft Institute, Balangir (The Odisha govt. has proposed to upgrade it to an Institute of Hotel Management.)
- Government Ayurveda College, Balangir
- Sushree Institute of Technical Education, College Of Nursing, Bolangir (Offers BSc. Nursing)
- Sushree Institute of Technical Education, School Of Nursing, Bolangir (Offers Diploma Course in General Nursing and Midwifery Training)
- Four ITIs: I.T.I., Bolangir; ITI (Women), Bolangir; KBK ITC, Bolangir; Sushree ITC, Sadaipali, Bolangir
- Sushree Institute of Technical Education (SITE),Bolangir (Offering Diploma in Engineering subjects)
Balangir has good connectivity to Bhubaneswar (two daily trains: an intercity day train and Raipur-Puri Express), Sambalpur (daily trains: Koraput-Rourkela, Ispat, Balangir-BBS, Koraput-HWH, Rayagada-SBP, Raipur-Puri, Dhanbad-Allepey), Titlagarh, Jharsuguda and Rourkela in Odisha, and has two daily trains to Howrah, one daily train to Chennai and Kerala, tri-weekly trains to Bangalore, bi-weekly train to Hyderabad, a weekly train to Mumbai, and tri-weekly (to become 5 times a week) trains to Delhi from Titlagarh which is 63 kms away.
The under construction Khurda-Balangir line receiveed 120 crores in this year’s budget and hopefully it will progress at good speed and get similar and larger budgets in the coming years. If that happens then this line could get completed in another 5 years. Once this line is completed the rail connectivity of Balangir will further improve.
Politically, it has an active MP in Kalikesh Singh Deo and MLA in A. U. SinghDeo who is an important minister in Odisha. Also, its interests are being watched over by Balangir natives abroad such as Dr. Sanjiv Karmee.
So things look positive for Balangir.
The most important things to watch for and/or pursue are: Making sure that the proposed university and the medical college that are in the pipeline are indeed established; Making sure that if there are new state engineering colleges then Balangir gets one; Encouraging and enticing other private entities to establish institutes and colleges in Balangir; and Making sure the Khurda-Balangir line gets completed in 5 years.
April 14th, 2010
Update: Following are excerpts from a follow-up Telegraph report which mentions about the committee’s recommendation to have wide-spread consultations before making the changes.
But it has advised caution in implementing the reforms. The panel has suggested detailed consultations and workshops with the state governments, other top engineering institutions like the National Institutes of Technology, and private universities.
The recommendations of the panel can be fine-tuned based on the outcome of the consultations, the team led by IIT Kharagpur director Damodar Acharya has suggested. The panel is likely to meet soon and may draw up a schedule for the consultations at that meeting.
… At a meeting of the panel in Chennai on March 16 with representatives of state and central school boards, some participants suggested that rural students be given more opportunities than urban students. The participants proposed two attempts for urban students and three for rural students.
The panel and the HRD ministry will also need to convince state governments that the move to end state-specific engineering tests is not against their interests.
Following is an excerpt from a report in Telegraph.
… The panel, appointed by human resource development minister Kapil Sibal, has recommended replacing the four-decade-old IIT-Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) and myriad other engineering entrance examinations with a common test modelled on the US-based scholastic aptitude test (SAT).
The panel has suggested that the IITs accord a 70 per cent weightage to board examination scores in picking students, ..
Scores in the common aptitude test that will replace the IIT-JEE will contribute the remaining 30 per cent weightage in determining which candidates are selected, the panel has recommended.
Unlike the current engineering entrance examinations including the IIT-JEE, the common aptitude test will not have questions on physics, chemistry and math, but will test students’ powers of logical reasoning and communication skills.
If the recommendations are accepted, the IITs will for the first time admit students based more on their board examination marks than on their performance in a special entrance test.
…The minister had announced in February that he was setting up a panel under IIT Kharagpur director Damodar Acharya to study proposed reforms to the IIT-JEE. The panel was appointed in March, with the directors of the IITs in Mumbai, Roorkee and Chennai as the other members.
… The panel has recommended that the government develop a Comprehensive Weighted Performance Index (CWPI) to calculate a student’s overall score based cumulatively on his performance in the board examinations and in the common aptitude test. The report appears principally based on discussions at a meeting held with other government representatives, including Central Board of Secondary Education chairman Vineet Joshi and select state representatives in Chennai on March 16.
The HRD ministry is already working towards a plan to introduce a common high school curriculum in the sciences and math, cutting across the 35 boards — central and state — that govern Indian school education.
The common curriculum would make easier a comparison between the board examination scores of students from schools affiliated to different central and state government boards, Joshi had told the meeting.
The CWPI proposed by the panel is aimed at normalising any differences that remain between difficulty levels of school-leaving examinations under different boards.
There is a big danger that the above approach will make the XIIth exams a high stakes affair and bring it under the microscope with every aspect of it being scrutinized and judged by everyone. Most coaching classes may reinvent themselves and start coaching how to score more marks in the XIIth exam and the proposed SAT type exam. This approach may bring in bias favoring students from families with educated parents. English being a compulsory subject in XIIth, this may put students in rural areas and other areas where English is less used at a disadvantage.
So one has to wait and see how this will pan out.
My guess is if the above idea is adopted, it will go through some changes such as specific types of colleges may be allowed to give different weight to Class XII marks in different subjects. Some may introduce interviews or other tests.
One change that should be made is that when possible specialty branches should not be assigned to most students (say 70-80% in any college/institute) immediately after they join a college/institute after the XIIth. That should be determined after a year in that college/institute based on the performance in that year. This will make the class XII exam less cutthroat and ensure that students after they get into a college/institute continue to give importance to academics.
One alternative idea may to test the proposed idea (of using class XIIth marks) on 50% of the seats for a few years before deciding whether to completely abandon the current approach or not.
April 14th, 2010