NIS Sparta to open community colleges

NIS Sparta, the training, education and learning solutions provider of the Reliance ADAG, is setting up 50 community colleges to link vocational education and employability with academics. In the next one year, the company will open these colleges in 50 cities of the country including small towns, urban and semi-urban clusters.

“Besides the metro cities of Delhi, Bangalore and Kolkata, we will open these colleges in tier-II cities that are industrial in nature. The curriculum will comprise presentations and domain theory along with mandatory soft skills like vocational skills,” said Manoj Chawla, Senior VP, NIS Sparta. Each college will require around Rs 10 lakh for the basic infrastructure like classrooms and library and have an initial strength of 50-100 students. Every college will be built on 2-3,000 square feet of land and will have a minimum of two classrooms.

Though no college is operational as yet, internal pilots have been going on. “The curriculum will focus on five components-attitudinal, domain studies, sales, customer services and leadership and the colleges will take some curriculum from IGNOU,” said Chawla. There would be three levels of programmes- certificate programme of 3-6 months, diploma programme of one year duration and an associate degree programme for two years. IGNOU will award the associate degree to students.

Any student who has completed class 12 is eligible to take admission in the college The enrollment, exam processes and certification will be done by IGNOU.As for the teachers, NIS will do a mandatory internal certification of all local trainers who intend to teach at the colleges.