Why Should We Assure Quality Teaching?

Abstract

Higher education is essential for India’s long-term social progress, economic growth, and sustainable development. To realize this purpose, stakeholders of universities and colleges need academic freedom and institutional autonomy. They should be innovative institutions that offer a huge range of opportunities for students to grow as wholesome personalities. There are two issues: providing access to higher education to the needy and the deserving, if not for all, and maintaining its quality. The former without the latter is a useless proposition. In fact, the quality is more essential than the quantity even though it cannot be attained overtime and quantified in tangible terms. Both ought to proceed simultaneously. The onerous responsibility lays on the part of the most important stakeholder from the delivery point of view — the teachers. Paradoxically, the learners also deserve equal attention because teachers without learners mean nothing as much as teaching without learning is an exercise in futility. The role of teachers in quality initiatives ranges from curriculum planning to curriculum implementation. It encompasses being sensitive to learner needs, articulating specific outcomes of learning for each course that is contemplated, unitizing the course content, providing access to the updated sources of knowledge, involving in materials production, devising teaching methods and techniques, involving learners in the process of interactive teaching-learning, trying out innovative testing techniques, harvesting ICT to suit the learning styles of the 21st tech-savvy learners, and creating academic and intellectual spaces for research.