|
Pharmacy colleges in Karnataka view that the growing importance of skilling and upskilling is inevitable in life-sciences as it helps candidates perform better and deliver outcomes efficiently. Making this even more evident, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman in the Union Budget 2023 has announced the need for multidisciplinary courses for medical devices and asserted the importance to teachers training.
Stating that dedicated multidisciplinary courses for medical devices will be supported in existing institutions to ensure availability of skilled manpower for futuristic medical technologies, high-end manufacturing and research, finance minister also said that teachers’ training will be re-envisioned through innovative pedagogy, curriculum transaction, continuous professional development, dipstick surveys, and ICT implementation. Here minister Sitharaman said that the district institutes of education and training will be developed as vibrant institutes of excellence for this purpose.
According to Dr Md. Salahuddin, principal, Al-Ameen College of Pharmacy and general secretary, Karnataka State Pharmacy Colleges Principals Association, “Education is a dynamic sector and continuous teachers training, reskilling & upskilling are a must. Technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), internet of things (IoT), data science, & cloud based technologies are rapidly growing and teachers of old times where they have never heard about the technology needs to get updated as most of the syllabus in pharmacy is going to be a dynamic one in the coming days. Hence teachers’ knowledge matters a lot.
Quoting a report of National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), Dr Salahuddin said only 2% of teachers have undergone formal skill training, which is alarming. Since education is a key development sector, we should enhance quality of learning, upgrade teachers skills & build robust institutional infrastructure to meet the present and future challenges. This will help to bridge the gap between the institution & industry.
With regularly upskilling of teachers & robust Institutional Infrastructure helps the students to be available as ready to employ graduates, said the Al-Ameen College of Pharmacy principal.
From the perspective of Umanandan Misra, dean Pharmacy Training Institute, continuous teachers training and dipstick surveys are recommended are key. Encouragement to education of all branches will be extremely helpful. Most important part in pharma is regular exposure to industry for both the teachers and students is needed.
In fact, at the Pharmacy Training Institute, we do not train on subjects and topics which are covered in the colleges, instead we provide complete industrial orientation in classroom and visit to factories and the companies which is a critical component for both teachers and students training, said Misra.
Dr H N Shivakumar, Vice-Principal and Professor, KLE College of Pharmacy, Bengaluru and co-founder, Institute for Drug Delivery and Biomedical Research (IDBR) Bengaluru, pointed out that continuous training of teachers is an essential component that needed to be addressed. Training pertaining to innovative pedagogy, faculty development, and implementation of ICT tools would be now an essential part of the training that is much warranted.
“We do have a good number of faculty members/resource persons having domain expertise in medical device manufacturing. This will ensure creation of manpower with this experience to help in high- end manufacturing and research,” added Prof. Shivakumar.
|