Deakin University's Indian teachers to get trained in Australia

The Indian teaching faculty employed at the Deakin University campus in GIFT City will be expected to complete a graduate certificate on teaching and learning methods in higher education, within the first three years of their employment.

Speaking to Business Standard, Professor Iain Martin, vice chancellor of Deakin University in Australia, said the training “is a mandatory part of being an educator at Deakin and is delivered flexibly, i.e. partly in-person and partly online”. The teacher training courses will be in the areas of cybersecurity and business analytics.

Since staff will be hired from India and the courses are accredited by the Australian Computer Society, the university plans to fly the educators to Australia for the training programme. The university will finalise further details in the next couple of months.

“I want to really emphasise that these will not be a small cohort of staff employed in India, but Deakin staff who happen to be employed in India. That’s not the same,” Martin said.

Promising parity of facilities, training, and responsibilities for the staff across their Australian and Indian campuses, the VC added that the university plans to bring its staff in India to the Australian campuses every 12 to 18 months.

This, he said, will not only let the Indian educators observe and learn from the pedagogical practices in Australia, but also help the Australians learn from their Indian colleagues. Officials also added that Deakin began as a teaching college and therefore teacher training was at the core of the university’s academic culture.

Highlighting the university’s aim of bringing “the Deakin culture to the Indian campus”, Ravneet Pawha, vice-president, global engagement, and CEO, South Asia, for Deakin, also pointed out that Deakin had already tied up with five industry partners — Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, HCL, HSBC and Zebia — for guest lectures, internships and apprenticeships.

Emphasising on the need to support a more integrated approach to skill development within their courses, Martin added that the two post graduate programmes in cybersecurity and business analytics that will be offered by the university’s GIFT City campus in Gujarat will not be purely academic courses but also be integrated with industry work.