KNOWLEDGE ECOSYSTEM
The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 mandates that universities offer holistic, multidisciplinary undergraduate education. As per ancient Indian teaching described in literary works like Banabhatta’s Kadambari,a good education includes the 64 kalaas (arts), which include subjects as diverse as singing and painting, chemistry and mathematics, carpentry and clothesmaking, medicine and engineering, and soft skills like discussion and debate.
At Amity, we have carefully planned how we will implement the NEP guidelines, including the adoption of new systems and processes, the designing of curriculum and reframing of assessment plans and ensuring that resources are available for the smooth conduct of academic activities from the academic year 2021-2022 onwards.
In order to implement flexible curricular structures to enable creative combinations of disciplines for study, we offer multiple entry and exit points. We have restructured our undergraduate programmes to create new possibilities for lifelong learning. Fouryear degree programmes with a research component are also being considered.
To allow a multidisciplinary curriculum, we have prescribed a minimum common syllabus based on the ‘three subject pattern’ to facilitate the academic bank of credits and have also executed a uniform framework to be followed across undergraduate degree programmes. For example, for five-year honours programmes—BA, LL.B/BCom, LL.B/BBA, LL.B— Amity Law School offers honours in both first and second degree. The first degree requires 10 courses of one major discipline and five courses each of two minor disciplines that are compulsory. The second degree requires four specialisations. Each group
consists of eight compulsory courses for students to get an honours/ specialisation degree in any stream. In addition to compulsory courses, clinical courses and internships are also offered.
The university offers an appropriate ecosystem to all faculty members, research scholars and students to bring out socially useful innovations and promote the growth of start-ups with a global reach. State-of-the-art research infrastructure has been created to augment research. The university has established a technology-enabling centre in collaboration with the government’s Department of Science & Technology, which will create an ecosystem for technology development in universities and provide a platform to network researchers with
“We enable creative combinations of disciplines and offer multiple entry and exit points” —PROFESSOR BALVINDER SHUKLA Vice Chancellor, Amity University, Noida
those in other institutions. Research clusters have been set up in more than 50 areas of research such as cancer biology, artificial intelligence, herbal and natural products, public health and waste management. We have filed more than 1,530 patents in areas of science, technology and allied areas.
To ensure that education did not suffer due to the pandemic, our inhouse IT team and faculty members worked on a war footing to make sure systems for
remote teaching and learning were in place for our students to learn from the safety of their homes. We were one of the first universities to start online classes even before the nationwide lockdown was declared last year in March. Individual mentoring was provided to all students through online mentor-mentee sessions conducted on Microsoft Teams platform and more than 15,000 mentoring sessions were conducted.