Odisha plans 4-year integrated teacher edu in 11 degree colleges  

BHUBANESWAR: The  State Higher Education department will offer a four-year integrated teacher education programme (ITEP) through 11 government-run degree colleges and three model degree colleges from the academic session of 2023-24 in accordance with the National Education Policy (NEP)-2020. 

In a letter to the higher education institutions (HEIs) on Wednesday, Principal Secretary of the department Saswat Mishra said that the colleges will run ITEP in regular mode from the next academic session instead of the two-year Bachelor of Education (BEd) course. Currently, the BEd courses are being run in these colleges in self-financing mode.

While the 11 degree colleges include eight autonomous colleges like BJB, SB Women’s, Vikram Dev College, the model colleges to offer the course are those in Rayagada, Malkangiri and Nabarangpur. Since the colleges will start the integrated course in 2023-24, they have been allowed to make admission of fresh students for their BEd programme only for the academic session 2022-23 and not beyond. 

Last year in October, the Ministry of Education had notified the ITEP, a dual-major bachelors degree offering BA-BEd, BSc-BEd and BCom-BEd. The integrated course will benefit students since they will save one year by finishing it in four years rather than the customary five years required under the present BEd-MEd system. It is also one of the major mandates of the NEP related to teacher education as teacher engagement from the year 2030 will be only through ITEP. It will be the minimum degree qualification for schoolteachers.

It has also been decided by the government that all the 16 standalone Teacher Education Institutions (TEIs) in the State will continue to offer BEd course and five of these institutions will also offer MEd in addition to the bachelors programme. The Secretary has asked all these colleges to apply for recognition of these courses to NCTE by May 31.

In the 2020-21 session, the recognition of 15 TEIs in Odisha was withdrawn by the National Council for Teacher Education due to lack of adequate number of faculty members in the institutions. Last year, NCTE had allowed them to run the BEd and MEd courses with a reduced number of students (maximum 50).