Hyderabad, Aug 3 (FN Bureau) University Grants Commission (UGC) Chairman Prof. M Jagadesh Kumar on Friday lamented that the Indian universities were not ready to offer courses on Prompt Engineering, though the industry had huge need of such professionals. Prompt Engineering is the practice of designing inputs for Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools that will produce optimal outputs, according to Mckinsey.. Jagadesh Kumar said Prompt Engineering is an emerging area as thousands of prompt engineers are required by the industry. Though an engineering tag is there to it, the universities can train a commerce or psychology student to become prompt engineers, said Prof. Jagadesh in his keynote address at the two-day conference on ‘Empowering Education Ecosystem, with the theme Resilience and Adaptability: Navigating Challenges in Education, hosted by FICCI in collaboration with the TGCHE (Telangana Government Council of Higher Education) here.
“We must ensure that because of the huge gap that we have between the skill sets that the students get from the education in the universities and the requirements of the industries that is leading to unemployment but underemployment,” he said. “There are huge numbers of jobs, but students are not ready. One of the top priorities for UGC now is to provide skill education to our students as part of their degree programs,” the UGC Chairman said. Praising New Education Policy (NEP) 2020, he said it lays a road map on how the nation can achieve the dream that it has set for itself. “The fundamental objectives of this NEP 2020 are very clear: we would like to provide learning outcomes-based education to our students; we want to provide personalised education to our students; and we also want to provide education on a mass scale considering the number of students that we have,” he said.
Scanning the higher education sector, he said out of 4.3 crore students, nearly 94% are in 482 private universities, 487 state-funded universities, and 130 deemed to be private universities. “I was surprised to realise when I took up the chairmanship of UGC that in a large number of universities there was no concept of an R&D cell, and we brought out the guidelines. I am glad to inform you that now hundreds of universities have established the R&D cell,” he said. The country now has around 85 universities offering ODL and online programmes out of around 1150 universities in the country, he said, wondering why the other universities can’t come forward to offer online education. “Nearly 60% of the colleges in our country are in rural areas, and 45% of the universities are in rural areas; they do not have good faculty members to teach the students in emerging areas. But we have a huge digital public infrastructure by the name of Swayam, with over 3000 courses,” he said. UGC has permitted students to register on the ABC portal and can take up to 40% of their degree credits from the Swayam portal. “We already have 4.3 crores, but the numbers need to be pushed up, and your role is critical,” the UGC Chairman added.