The Staff development, designing and training, learning and development
(L&D) are very essential in the domain of Higher Education (HE) in India. The
changing of the present day, too, have added a multitude of issues to the Higher
Education Institutions (HEI). At a point in time, the Academic Staff Colleges (ASC)
made the efforts to train the teachers joining the HEI, through orientation programs and
engage the in-service teachers through refresher courses, which made all efforts to
build the capabilities of the teaching community. The explosion in HE with the coming
in of Private Universities, deemed to be Universities, Autonomous Institutions, and
increase in Central Universities, ensured that the L&D for HE teachers became
essential. The ASCs were established by the University Grants Commission (UGC) in
1987 and did yeomen service to the Nation and the HE teaching community after they
came into existence following the recommendations of the then New Education Policy
of 1986 till 2015, when they were rechristened as UGC-Human Resources
Development Centers (UGC-HRDC) and continued to cater to the needs of the faculty
and the administrators of HEI across the country. By 2020, the UGC-HRDCs started to
roll out the Faculty Induction Programmes (FIP) in ten structural modules to help the
faculty members to the newer nuances of the fast-changing dynamics of HE. The
present study is a real-time assessment of the way UGC-HRDCs have taken to virtual
training and adopted to the Hybrid-mode of learning for the benefit of the teaching
communities and administrators. 2023 has been a watershed year for Higher Education,
Teacher capacity building, with the UGC-HRDC being rechristened as UGC-MMTTC,
with an intent to usher in synergy and integration between programs as envisaged by
the Ministry of Education, Government of India.
Keywords: Faculty induction programme (FIP), Higher education, Higher education institutions (HEI), Staff development.
