Odisha Govt to Offer Four-Year Integrated Course in Teacher Edu in 11 Degree Colleges

Bhubaneswar: In line with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2022, the Odisha Higher Education Department has decided to offer a four-year integrated teacher education programme (ITEP) through 11 state-run degree colleges and three model degree colleges.

This will start from the academic session 2023-2024.

Principal Secretary of the Higher Education Department Saswat Mishra wrote a letter to the higher education institutes (HEIs) mentioning that the colleges will be running ITEP in the regular mode from the next academic session onwards as opposed to the two-year Bachelor of Education (BEd) course.

Currently, the BEd courses in these colleges are running in a self-financing mode.

While the 11 degree colleges include eight autonomous colleges like BJB, SB Women’s and Vikram Dev College, the model colleges to offer the course are those in Rayagada, Malkangiri and Nabarangpur.

Since the integrated course will commence only in 2023-24, they have been instructed to admit fresh students for the BEd programme till 2022-23 only and not beyond.

The state government issued the direction as per the National Education Policy (NEP)-2020 which was announced by the Ministry of Education in October last year.

As per the notification of the ministry, the dual-major bachelors degree offering BA-BEd, BSc-BEd and BCom-BEd aims at saving one year of the students who can complete the integrated course in four years in place of five years at present.

The state government has also announced that BEd courses will continue to be offered in 16 standalone Teacher Education Institutions (TEIs), out of which, five of these institutes will also be offering MEd in addition to the bachelor’s programme.

The Secretary has asked all these colleges to apply for recognition of these courses to NCTE (National Council for Teacher Education) by May 31.