While educational institutes across the country may be reeling under pressure due to lack of faculty members, some have already begun taking initiatives to tackle the issue. Ahmedabad-based National Institute of Design (NID), for instance, has planned to set up a faculty development centre soon to cater to the growing demand for design faculty members.
The institute plans to train teachers from several disciplines like art, architecture and engineering and convert them into design faculties. “The entire country needs teachers. To address the dire need to have more number of faculty members is a major agenda of the NID this year. We will set up a faculty development centre that will cater to not only our needs but that of the whole nation,” said Pradyumna Vyas, director of NID.
The centre, according to Vyas, will augment NID’s efforts of focusing on multi-disciplinary education whereby the institute aims to inculcate design education among students from other disciplines like management, social sciences and humanities. “In order to bring together all these disciplines and to come out with something interesting, we are going to talk to other institutes like the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) for introducing elective-based education. This will help promote a larger understanding of various subject areas among the student community. Also, we want design to be a part of every discipline,” said Vyas.
To begin with, the institute has already started training programmes at its Ahmedabad campus. As of now, the faculty strength at NID is roughly about 60, apart from visiting faculty members. “We had been facing a faculty crunch for sometime which led us to initiate such programmes. However, the faculty development centre that will come up will provide not only NID with design faculty members but also other institutes across the country with design experts,” said Vyas.
Similarly, IIM-Lucknow (IIM-L) is planning to start National Faculty Development Centre at Noida campus this year. The centre aims at providing development skills to the faculties from other business schools. The institute’s director, Devi Singh, had said that he plans to focus on faculty development as a priority by increasing the institute’s faculty strength, besides looking at infrastructure development, and consolidating its existing programmes both at Lucknow and Noida campuses.