NAAC Sponsored One Day National Webinar
on
“Building Institutions:
Role of Accreditation Process and Role of Stakeholders in HEIs
In light of National Education Policy 2020”
Organized by
Janki Devi Memorial College
(University of Delhi)

Topic: “Building Institutions: Role of Accreditation Process and Role of Stakeholders in HEIs in Light of National Education Policy 2020”

Panelists:Dr. Jagannath Patil, NAAC Adviser; Dr. SmitaRaosaheb Deshmukh, Member of Executive Committee, NAAC and Prof. Abid Haleem, Jamia Milia Islamia

Date: 21st October 2021

The Internal Quality Assurance Cell (IQAC), Janki Devi Memorial College (University of Delhi) organized a NAAC-Sponsored One-Day National Webinar on “Building Institutions: Role of Accreditation Process and Role of Stakeholders in HEIs, in light of National Education Policy 2020” on October 21, 2021. The distinguished panel of speakers for the Seminar comprised Dr. Jagannath Patil, NAAC Adviser, Dr. SmitaRaosaheb Deshmukh, Member of Executive Committee, NAAC and Prof. Abid Haleem, Jamia Milia Islamia.

The session started with a welcome address by Dr. Shilpa Chaudhary, IQAC Coordinator, JDMC. Dr. Namita Sethi, Member, IQAC, JDMC introduced Prof. Swati Pal, Principal, JDMC and Dr. Kusum Krishna, Chairperson, Governing Body, JDMC to the audience.

In her inaugural address, Prof. Swati Pal, Principal, JDMC thanked all those concerned in NAAC for facilitating this webinar and also thanked the eminent panel of speakers for taking out time from their busy schedule. Prof. Pal shared that it has been an immensely learning journey since our first cycle of accreditation took place. Initially the process of accreditation seemed an uphill task and along with it was the worry about the grades. However performance anxiety is essential for excellent performance. She emphasized the importance of possessing the qualities of alertness to emerging changes in environment and the ability to respond. The institution needs to have the vision and the focus to proceed on the path being put forward by the NAAC that has a clear picture of global standards in education. As a theatre studies researcher, Prof. Pal compared the role of stakeholders to theatre wherein all players are expected to give their best- from playwright to costume design to sound to direction to acting to makeup – for a smooth conduct of a play. Similarly all stakeholders in HEIs must realize their role and be conscious and aware that omissions on their part can have a huge impact on the institution. In her capacity as the Principal, she shared that to achieve higher standards in quality education, she has been striving to give the best infrastructure as well as opportunities such as hostel, research facilities, extension work, opportunities for entrepreneurship development etc. In addition to adapting teaching-learning as our response to the pandemic, the college has tried to move beyond humanities and commerce and has got the permission to offering new courses namely Operations Research, Computer Science and Statistics. The college has shown tremendous progress during the last five years, thanks to the accreditation process and to the collective efforts of all stakeholders. The Principal expressed her gratitude to the Governing Body, faculty, admin and IQAC, without whose support it would not have been possible to achieve so much. The accreditation process has indeed motivated us to do whatever we can to make the college better and that the path has to carved out as to how each college can retain its unique character along with conforming to NAAC and NEP and serving the students’ interests.

In her inaugural speech, Dr. Kusum Krishna, Chairperson, Governing Body, JDMC congratulated IQAC for organizing the webinar in collaboration with NAAC. Since she has been a part of building the college for the last five decades, she found the topic very close to her heart. Dr. Krishna shared that education has been an integral part of her life and that she has always shown keen interest in the growth of the college. She emphasized the need for the college to adapt to changing needs of education and society even while retaining its vision to empower women especially those from the under-privileged sections and aiming at personality growth and confidence building in its students. In light of NEP 2020, there would be many implications for the ideal role of various stakeholders. Dr. Krishna felt delighted to share that JDMC has certainly played an important role in changing the lives of many young women and that the college is fulfilling the vision of its founder Sh. Brij Krishan Chandiwala by empowering women. She ended by wishing a fruitful and enriching day for all. Dr. Jagannath Patil, Advisor, NAAC Bengaluru & Regional Coordinator (Northern Region), NAAC delivered the keynote address on the topic, ‘Role of Accreditation in Building Institutions’. He gave an elaborate description on each and every parameter related to quality and accreditation in context of higher education and key features of revised accreditation framework of NAAC. He emphasized that the Quality Assurance (QA) is a powerful tool to ensure accountability for public funding, to secure trust, protecting students and stakeholders from the dubious provisions. He briefly discussed the importance and benefits of accreditation in helping the institution to know its strengths, weakness and opportunities through an informed review process. Dr. Patil’s presentation highlighted the NAAC’s efforts in institutionalizing quality culture in the HEIs such as self-evaluation, IQAC, green audit, gender audit and various other new practices which have been introduced by the colleges due to NAAC process. He also discussed some quality assessment models other than NAAC which are prevalent across the world such as Malcolm Baldrige in US; Kaizen in Japan and Six Sigma model widely used in industry but slowly getting into academia. Thus, after studying many global models and learning from its own experience, NAAC has evolved its own model of IQAC. Dr. Patil described the key features of two types of metrics ‘Qualitative Metrics’ and ‘Quantitative Metrics’ and also outlined the seven criteria of Quality Indicator Framework (QIF), which are the most important part of the NAAC assessment. In addition, the key features of Revised Accreditation Framework (RAF) and its expected outcomes were also discussed. He also highlighted the mechanism of system generated grade of HEIs and the components of NAAC Accreditation Outcome. He ended the session by emphasizing the role of NEP 2020 in taking the quality movement in HEIs to highest level and accreditation to become the backbone of quality. He mentioned that there are likely to be multiple accreditation agencies in future which is a real quality movement and that NAAC can play an important role in it.

After the keynote address, Dr. NeeruVasishth, Faculty Member, IQAC, JDMC introduced and welcomed the two eminent speakers Dr. SmitaRaosaheb Deshmukh and Prof. Abid Haleem. The distinguished resource person Prof. SmitaRaosaheb Deshmukh, Member of Executive Committee of NAAC, Member of Binary Accreditation Committee, Principal, of MVDM, Amravati Maharashtra, Member of Academic Council, Senate, SGBAU, Amravati presented on the topic, ‘Role of Stakeholders in Building Institutions’. Prof. Deshmukh provided a comprehensive discussion of various aspects of quality enhancement and shared several important tips for developing the best practices for building institutions of higher learning and enabling them to be ready for Education 4.0. She highlighted the efforts made by UGC during the nationwide lockdown like webinar, online meets etc., which helped to make productive use of the period and need for restructuring of HEs to ensure the quality and standards of education. Thus, institutions need to channelize their efforts towards promoting holistic academic excellence and the very first step towards achieving that is institutionalization and internalization of quality enhancement initiatives. Dr. Deshmukh discussed in detail the key role of various external and internal stakeholders. The internal stakeholders include management, faculty members, students and the external stakeholders comprise employers, alumni, parents and society. She emphasized that each stakeholder in the education system is essential to the success of education goals and their performance evaluation. These stakeholders are the most powerful information source which can be utilized for HEIs development. The presentation ended with emphasis on the role of education in means of socializing individuals and to keep the society smoothing and stable.

The Distinguished Resource Person Prof. Abid Haleem, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Technology, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi enlightened the participants on the topic ‘Improving Research Visibility’. Prof. Haleem emphasized the importance of research and discussed various type of research as well as the concept of life of research. He stressed on creating and disseminating knowledge for the betterment of the society. With the advent of information technology, the task of creation and dissemination has become quite simple and swift which can feed into improved research visibility. He also mentioned about the competitive environment faced by the today’s scholars in academics. He enlightened the participants with the research types and the list of indexed journals. He also discussed the top international publishers such as Elsevier, SAGE, Cambridge University Press (CUP), Oxford University Press (OUP), Taylor and Francis. Prof. Haleem elaborated on the importance of citation databases, their setups, core collection databases etc. He discussed Web of Science, Google Scholars, J Gate, SCOPUS etc as some of the renowned citation databases. Prof. Haleem shared several useful and important tips for improving research visibility. He stressed upon creating id on academic/ research networking sites such as Orcid, Research Gate, Academia, Mendeley and Kudos. With the advent of IT, one can promote his/her research through social media platforms such as Twitter, FB too. He described a Researcher’s Adhar to comprise SSRN, ORCID, Scopus and Wos researcher id. Prof. Haleem discussed several useful strategies through which the visibility can be improved, such as by organizing and attending conferences and seminars both at the national as well as international level; publishing papers in journals indexed by the citation databases such as SCOPUS etc. Researchers can also develop their own websites and must have and use institutional email-ids. He emphasized the importance of disseminating research and making it open access for the scholars. He ended with a closing remark that the pressure on research visibility is increasing due to research being a vital component for teaching/researcher/development based jobs and that social media presence is a must for researchers in present context.

The session was attended by 203 participants. The presentations by the eminent speakers were followed by an interactive session wherein Dr. Patil, Dr. Deshmukh and Prof. Haleem answered all queries that were raised by the participants thereby making the session extremely interactive, informative and fruitful. It was indeed a great learning experience for all the participants. The one-day seminar ended with a Vote of Thanks by Prof. Sandhya Garg, Vice-Principal, JDMC.

The YouTube link for the session is: