Delhi University is considering extending teaching hours in its colleges from 8 am to 8 pm as a way to expand the number of seats, said Vice-Chancellor Yogesh Singh Tuesday while speaking at an Idea Exchange session at The Indian Express.
When asked if expanding student intake is on the cards for Delhi University, he said, “I am all for expansion and we will create new institutions in Delhi. But we should create more facilities and infrastructure in the existing institutions because that is easy to implement.”
Singh said one of the ways DU is thinking of exploring this is by increasing teaching hours in colleges to accommodate a larger number of sections for a given programme.
“Good institutions, I feel, should work from 8 to 8. With that, I think, we can easily admit one or two or three more sections of students. Right now, we are working from 8 to 5. We can easily enhance the working timings from 8 to 8. Normal office timings will remain the same, from 9 to 5 or 9 to 6. But classrooms and laboratories will start from 8 am and end at 8 pm so that we can accommodate more sections so that the number of seats will be enhanced,” he said.
DU has around 70,000 sanctioned seats against which it conducts undergraduate admissions. The admission process for this year is still ongoing though a bulk of the admissions have been completed and the academic session for newly-admitted students began on November 2.
Singh said the university is hoping to introduce these extended hours in a few colleges at least from the next academic year. He said before that the focus of the university is on completing the hiring process for regular teachers across colleges. According to him, there are 4000 vacancies across colleges against which 500 teachers have been recruited in the last few months, and the university hopes to clear this backlog in “six months or one year”.
“It is easily possible and doable. We don’t need additional infrastructure for that. It’s a low-hanging fruit. We have teachers but if an additional course is assigned to a teacher then we can pay an additional amount for that course. If it was very easy, I would have done it from this academic session but right now we are very busy with the interviews. We want there to be a good number in these institutions or else principals will say ‘we have so many vacancies, please fill up those and we will talk about this after that’,” he said.
“From the next academic session, at least some of the colleges, I think, will be ready to implement this and we will have a few more seats for our students,” he added.
Courtesy : The Indian Express