UGC-HRDC: Virtual Learning, Challenges, Opportunities, and Vision for the Future

The Staff development, designing and training, learning and development (L&D) are very essential in the domain of Higher Education (HE) in India. The changing of the present day, too, have added a multitude of issues to the Higher Education Institutions (HEI). At a point in time, the Academic Staff Colleges (ASC) made the efforts to train the teachers joining the HEI, through orientation programs and engage the in-service teachers through refresher courses, which made all efforts to build the capabilities of the teaching community. The explosion in HE with the coming in of Private Universities, deemed to be Universities, Autonomous Institutions, and increase in Central Universities, ensured that the L&D for HE teachers became essential. The ASCs were established by the University Grants Commission (UGC) in 1987 and did yeomen service to the Nation and the HE teaching community after they came into existence following the recommendations of the then New Education Policy of 1986 till 2015, when they were rechristened as UGC-Human Resources Development Centers (UGC-HRDC) and continued to cater to the needs of the faculty and the administrators of HEI across the country. By 2020, the UGC-HRDCs started to roll out the Faculty Induction Programmes (FIP) in ten structural modules to help the faculty members to the newer nuances of the fast-changing dynamics of HE. The present study is a real-time assessment of the way UGC-HRDCs have taken to virtual training and adopted to the Hybrid-mode of learning for the benefit of the teaching communities and administrators. 2023 has been a watershed year for Higher Education, Teacher capacity building, with the UGC-HRDC being rechristened as UGC-MMTTC, with an intent to usher in synergy and integration between programs as envisaged by the Ministry of Education, Government of India.

Keywords: Faculty induction programme (FIP), Higher education, Higher education institutions (HEI), Staff development.