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Building Competencies of the Faculty
At CHRIST (Deemed to be University), “All aspects of quality assurance have been through building competencies of the faculty through enhancing teacher quality and quality-enhancing strategies,” according to Dr. Kennedy Andrew Thomas, director of the Centre for Education Beyond Curriculum (CEDBEC). “Quality initiatives are mainly carried out through a range of faculty development programs and through consciously encouraging and driving the internal quality assurance and self-improvement mechanisms voluntarily at the institutional level.”
The following are examples of the avenues CHRIST uses to promote teacher quality:
- The Center for Beyond Curriculum (CEDBEC) has organized a comprehensive range of professional development programs aimed at updating and developing faculty to contribute to the quality of higher education.
- The Academic Staff College (ASC) creates awareness among faculty members about the significance of higher education. ASC programs help faculty keep abreast of the latest developments in their discipline, create awareness about pedagogic and evaluation tools, and build research competencies among faculty members.
- Academic departments organize short-term Quality Improvement Programs (QIP) in emerging areas of subject- and discipline-specific topics, focused workshops for domain-specific skills, symposia in collaboration with industry, and the like. The main objectives of QIP are to update faculty members’ expertise and skills; understand a subject from a broader perspective; and identify research areas, methodologies, and new pedagogical practices.
- Faculty are exposed to the academic culture of overseas universities to imbibe their academic culture. Faculty participation in seminars workshops and conferences, improving faculty qualification through doctoral studies, undertaking major research projects and consultancy services: all are used to help drive quality assurance at the university.
To read more about Dr. Kennedy Andrew Thomas’s outlook on quality assurance, click here.
Please click on the following individual’s names for additional perspectives on quality assurance from Francis Evangelista (Miriam College), Nichanan Sakolvieng (Assumption University), and Lakshmi Priya Daniel (Stella Maris College).