BENGALURU: How about learning cricket and cinema along with BCom, contemporary dance movements with chemistry or entrepreneurial botany with English literature? With the first-year degree classes kicking off in many top colleges on lines with National Education Policy (NEP), students are picking up a variety of courses that are being offered as open electives.
As per the NEP, students can choose open electives from other streams apart from the departments they are enrolled in. Many autonomous colleges asked each department to come up with elective courses that can be pursued by students of any stream.
The four popular electives in Jyoti Nivas College are Nutrition for physical and mental health; photography and visual storytelling; German; and contemporary dance movements and practice. At St Joseph's College of Commerce, the favourites are gender and leadership; event management; cricket and cinema; disaster management and social justice. Mount Carmel College is offering 37 courses as electives, with an intake of 60 students each. The seats will be filled in on a first come, first served basis. As the student portal opened, students could register for the courses. For those who missed out, the subjects will be available next semester. The courses are as diverse as cultural diversity at workplace to electronics for everyone, financial mathematics, entrepreneurial botany, democracy and media, and e-business and retailing.
“The courses offered by the economics department -- markets and government policy; politics and impact on business were filled in fast. Economics is popular across arts, science and commerce students. Social entrepreneurship, fashion and image management, web technology, chemistry in daily life, stock market operations, digital marketing were other popular courses that got good response,” said Raghu VN, spokesperson of the college.
NMKRV College for Women principal Snehalatha Nadiger said many are trying to play it safe and not opting for radical changes .
A faculty at Maharani’s College for Science, now under Maharani Cluster University, said biotechnology and statistics are the favourite choices. At RC College of Commerce, around 70% of students have chosen accounting. The other popular choices are personal finance and planning, people management and rural development.
Surana College principal Bhavani MR said the college will have a consortium of neighbourhood colleges to help each other to offer maximum courses as possible. “Our college has a wide variety of subjects. In case a neighbourhood college wants to offer one of those courses, we are ready to welcome its students. Similarly, we can send our students to their colleges too..”
Several colleges said they are awaiting full syllabus from the universities in open electives so that they can allow students to make informed choices. “While the syllabus of the core disciplines are here, those of many core electives are yet to come,” said a principal.
