Hyderabad: The University of Hyderabad (UoH) administration has decided to resume online classes for its about 2,000 ongoing post-graduate students, who are enrolled in various programs, with effect from August 20. The university had suspended classes for all batches on March 15 and has since completed the evaluation process of final semester students, allowing them to graduate.
The entrance examinations for the new batch of students are scheduled to be conducted from September 24 to September 26. Like every year, entrances will be held in the offline mode. However, instead of two sessions, they will be held in three sessions per day.
Vice-Chancellor P Apparao, addressing a virtual press interaction on Wednesday, said that a Task Force was constituted, headed by senior professor and former dean of the Sarojini Naidu School of Arts & Communication, Vinod Pavarala. “We held wide-ranging consultations with various stakeholders, including students and faculty members, and received a number of suggestions by email on the resumption of academic activities,” he said.
“As per the recommendations by the Task Force, all the departments will start teaching online from Thursday. It will be a blend of asynchronous and synchronous methods. All the teaching staff has already been trained in various workshops conducted by our resource personnel,” the VC said.
Cognizant of the difficulties that some students are likely to face with the costs of connectivity, the university has also accepted the recommendation of the Task Force to re-purpose the existing BBL (boarding allowance) scholarship of Rs.1000 a month into a Digital Access Grant (DAG) for students belonging to economically-weaker sections.
The V-C has also mentioned the University’s plan to shore up ICT infrastructure at the department level to enable the faculty to effectively deliver online teaching. “The individual departments are given flexibility in reducing the syllabus and further, in conducting the final exams and its assessment,” he added.
As many 300 Ph.D. students from science faculties have also been given permission to conduct their research in wet labs (laboratories where various kinds of potentially hazardous chemicals are experimented). Initially, only students from Hyderabad who are in their advanced stages of research will be allowed on an experimental basis. More research students from across the country will be allowed later, in a phased manner, said the UoH administration on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the university held its place in the top 10 list of universities in the Union education ministry’s Atal Ranking of Institutions on Innovation Achievements (ARIIA) 2020, which was released on Tuesday (August 18).