Govt eyes collaboration with top foreign varsities

BHUBANESWAR: The Higher Education department is eyeing collaboration with leading universities of England and Australia for starting dual degree programmes in order to align itself with the objectives of the National Education Policy (NEP)-2020.These universities are Nottingham Trent University in England and Deakin University, Australia.

Under NEP-2020, the University Grants Commission (UGC) this year mandated India’s public universities to start twinning and dual degree programmes with foreign universities. The commission in May approved the UGC (Academic Collaboration between Indian and Foreign Higher Educational Institutions to offer Twinning, Joint Degree and Dual Degree Programmes) Regulations, 2022. Dual and twinning degree programme is now also mandatory for NIRF ranking and NAAC grading.

Currently, almost all the public universities in Odisha have at least 50 foreign functional research collaborations with a majority of them being Utkal, Ravenshaw, Sambalpur and Berhampur universities.
But unlike other public universities in the country, none of the state universities have yet entered into agreement with any foreign universities for teaching-learning.

Higher Education Minister Rohit Pujari said under the twinning and dual degree programmes, Odisha’s focus area will be skill development. In this regard, officials of Nottingham Trent University and Deakin University will meet the Odisha higher education authorities and vice-chancellors on Thursday (December 8) and December 12 respectively.

“Both the foreign universities are known for their skilling courses. We are initially planning to focus on skill and competency areas like machine learning, data science, data mining (big data management) and artificial intelligence which can be offered and pursued online. The reason behind choosing these and similar subjects is that in the virtual space today, both classes and practicals for these subjects are being allowed online and credits earned are accepted by universities,” said a higher official of the department.

Apart from universities, the centres of excellence opened under Odisha University Research and Innovation Incentivisation Plan(OURIIP) will explore subjects areas (like native medicines, ethnicity, culture) for which they can collaborate with these two universities for research.

COURSES IN FOCUS

 Machine learning
 Data science
 Data mining (big data management)
 Artificial intelligence