The Punjab Higher Education Commission (PHEC) has planned to establish state-of-the-art staff development academies in Lahore, Multan and Rawalpindi to provide well-designed capacity building trainings to the teaching faculty of public sector higher education institutions. It has envisaged setting up SDAs in University of Education in Lahore and Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan.
This was disclosed in the meeting which held in the office of Chairman PHEC with Higher Education Minister Syed Raza Ali Gillani in the chair today. Besides Chairman PHEC Dr. M Nizamuddin and DG Dr. Shahid Soroya, representatives of higher education department and educationists, attended the meeting. The meeting reviewed the process of interventions to improve the quality of higher education. Provincial Minister Raza Gillani said that provision of all the necessary facilities in the higher education institutions is essential to raise their academic standards. He said that morning assembly should be revived in the colleges to sensitize them about ethical, moral values as well as the importance of self-discipline. He further said the college canteen system should be reshaped in such a way to help provide quality food-items at subsidized rates to the students. Similarly, an institutional mechanism of career counseling should be established to educate the students about choosing future targets, he added. The meeting decided to set up higher education advisory council under the Minister to recommend proposals about improvement in higher education sector. Mr. Gillani said that state of the art language centers should be established so that the students could learn foreign languages. He observed that publication of research journals should be fully encouraged in universities so as to encourage research-based publications.
Chairman PHEC Dr. Nizamuddin informed that faculty development program of public sector universities has been initiated with an amount of Rs. 200 million. The meeting agreed that necessary linkages between industry and academia should be developed so that the industrial sector could benefit from universities’ research and innovation.