UGC asks universities to implement community engagement and social responsibility guidelines

NEW DELHI: The University Grants Commission (UGC) has asked higher educational institutions to implement a two credit course on community engagement and social responsibility as part of the guidelines on “Fostering social responsibility and community engagement in higher education institutions”.

UGC informed colleges and universities that it has developed a Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) course on community engagement and social responsibility. The course will be available on the SWAYAM portal – swayam.gov.in soon.

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“To facilitate the effective implementation of the two-credit course on community engagement and social responsibility, HEIs are requested to take appropriate action as per the enclosed guidelines in their respective HEIs. The UGC has developed a MOOC course on community engagement and social responsibility which will be shortly available on the SWAYAM portal. Looking forward to your active cooperation and support to instil the concept of community engagement and social responsibility in HEIs, a major recommendation of NEP 2020,” said UGC in an official notification.

For the course, the commission has identified seven regional centres for capacity building of faculty as Master Trainers (MTs) for Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) under Unnat Bharat Abhiyan (UNA).

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In order to prepare the faculty members for teaching the two-credit course from the next academic session, UGC conducted two online training programmes for selected faculty members from the regional centres from January 27 to February 15, 2022. It also conducted three day face-to-face training programmes in each centre from April to July 2022 under the supervision of Subject Expert Group (SEG) resources and local resource persons.

On February 28, 2022, UGC had invited feedback on draft guidelines and it said that the suggestions received have been incorporated to prepare the final guidelines.