Kalpa Academy Center for Governance and Sustainable Development, in collaboration with Kantipur City College, organized a webinar on higher education governance after the pandemic. Academicians and scholars from both technical and non-technical fields from Nepal, Thailand, and Norway presented their views on the need to give continuity to higher education despite challenges of COVID-19, through a blended modality of virtual teaching and learning.
Altogether 117 participants from various streams of higher education in the country and abroad attended the webinar.
Senior educationist and former Dean of Kathmandu University, Dr. Mana Prasad Wagle portrayed the disruption caused by COVID-19 in the current landscape of higher education in Nepal offered by nearly 11 universities and 7 academies to some 700,000 students. He emphasized the need to develop a sense of solidarity and collaboration among leaders of educational institutions for mitigating the adverse impact of the COVID-19 on higher education. Dr. Wagle prescribed a roadmap for higher education in the post-pandemic period urging all those in positions of governance to be sensitive to the continuity of higher education.
Dr. Pralhad Karki, President of Kalpa Academy, initiating the discussion observed that it is time all stakeholders of higher education in Nepal should come together and focus on ways to make higher education and its institutions sustainable in the post-pandemic scenario.
Academician of NAST, PDC of Madan Bhandari University of Science and Technology and Board President of NEGAAS and Goethe Zentrum, Prof. Dr. Ramesh Kumar Maskey pointed out the challenges facing online teaching-learning in technical fields such as engineering and other sciences. He shed light on the digital divide troubling higher education students and the gap in knowledge, skill, and mindset among teachers for undertaking digital models of delivering higher education.
Dr. Manish Pokhrel stressed the need to get all stakeholders of higher education on board while developing a new modality of teaching and learning in post-COVID times. The online teaching and learning should not be construed as another version of traditional teaching and learning, Dr. Pokhrel remarked that the pedagogy, curriculum, delivery, and evaluation of higher education should be tailored in a different design. A leadership with academic vision can only guide the future of post-pandemic higher education, he opined.
Senior media academician, Professor Rama Krishna Regmee, moderating the webinar session, observed the deliberations served as a stimulus for higher education stakeholders to build resilience for coping with COVID-19-disruptions and emerge determined to innovative modality of teaching-learning.
From Thailand's King Mongkut's University, Khagendra Raj Dhakal referred to the survey taken among 30,000 students on disruption in higher education caused by COVID-19 and said students wanted continuity while braving against the pandemic. Dhakal stressed the student-centric approach to the delivery of higher education arguing for recognizing the virtual space as important as the physical campus in serving the broad cause of higher education.
Dr. Devinder Thapa from the University of Agder, Norway urged everyone to take COVID-19-times as a window of opportunity to undertake innovations in higher education. He focused on making the curriculum context-friendly to bring a change in the mindset.
Facilitating the discussion session, Abhas D Rajopadhyaya termed the deliberations enlightening and hoped it would inspire all concerned to take steps to give continuity to higher education amidst the challenges posed by COVID-19.
