Odisha’s higher education department will train around three thousand college teachers by the end of this financial year, for quality teaching and overall excellence. This faculty training programme will be conducted under the aegis of Odisha Higher Education Programme for Excellence and Equity, as part of a World Bank project.
The training programme will essentially act as a refresher course for the teachers, many of whom have been found out of sync with the latest research developments and ideas in their own field. A better understanding of their subjects will help them to ignite the spirit of enquiry amongst students, ultimately leading to an improved teaching-learning process. B. Parameswaran, the state’s project director, has said that more than 10,000 teachers from over a thousand private and government colleges would be trained in a phased manner.
“We have set a target to physically train 3,000 teachers in the first phase and use open online courses (MOOC) to train the rest of them in the second phase. As it is difficult to train that many teachers physically, we will introduce the online courses”, said Parameswaran. The guidelines for the training project is expected to be set by April 1 next year.