Role Of Alumni In Higher Education 2
Curriculum design phase The alumni can help the institution to include courses on entrepreneurship skills and leadership qualities for students by giving the feedback periodically. They help to identify the currently appropriate requirements for development relevant to successful employment, ensuring the inclusion of essential skill elements. They also help to identify the professional organisations which are useful to the particular field and to know what type of skills is most important for industry.
Implementation phase In this phase, alumni can involve themselves in providing orientation programmes or bridge courses for freshers. The alumni may institute awards prizes and contribute books to the library or establish book bank. A Corpus Fund may be raised to cater to the needs of the genuinely deserving candidates. They can provide educational CDS, software packages and other types of learning resources to further the knowledge of the students. They can help the differently abled students by providing special learning resources, scribes, support services and act as scribes. They can provide financial aid to support the poor, needy and meritorious and also provide coaching to slow learners, preparing students for competitive examinations like TANCET, CAT, SET, NET, CSIR, and IAS and so on.
They can purchase equipment, machinery and other resources for the use of the institution. The alumni can pass on information through on-line by developing ‘blogs’ which enable the students to post their responses. Through on-line, the alumni can share their information in the following manner:
* e-alerts
* Quick paging
* e-message centre
* Hints & reminders
* e-Newsletters
* On-line discussions
* e-seminars & Video conferencing
* PowerPoint presentations
The alumni can arrange for business forum, guest speakers, workshops, lectures, conferences, exhibitions, field trips, surveys, and symposia, programmes to enhance the students’ employment potential, and improve their awareness on career options. They can also establish on a temporary or permanent basis, a training/coaching centre to offer free coaching to the deserving students. Alumni awards for outstanding students can be given every year.
They can assist the institutions
* For establishing MOUs and industry-institution linkages, counselling centers
* Self-employment training centers and organising campus interviews.
Evaluation phase The alumni are instrumental in getting the opinion of the parents, employers and society about the performance and functioning of the institution. Gathering feed back from the alumni helps to improve teaching-learning process, research and development, infrastructure development and industry-institution partnership. They provide support services viz.
Help to identify areas of research and development.
Develop an alumni web-site which is a powerful data acquisition tool to capture demographic participation and behavioural data base over years, offer opportunity through that website to personalise what information they will share, type of news to receive, how website looks to them, by what methods they want to be contacted and their frequency and provide opportunities to integrate ‘friend-raising and fund raising’.
Conclusion Thus the alumni of educational institutions play a significant role in the advancement of higher education as donors and also contribute time and expertise in the development and advancement of the institution. They can work for dissemination of value system of educational institution especially its ideals of service to mankind. tagheuerformula.