Value Added Courses in the Colleges of Nagaland: An Exploratory Study

Value added courses are additional educational programs or modules that are designed to complement the core curriculum of a degree program. These courses aim to provide students with extra skills, knowledge, and experiences that go beyond the traditional academic requirements. Value added courses are intended to enhance students’ overall learning experience, make them more competitive in the job market and better prepare them for the challenges of the professional world. These skill sets beyond the degree that one possesses will make an individual more desirable to secure a job and at the same time sustain the job and face challenges along the way and therefore considering this need, the NEP 2020 made a visionary step to introduce. The significance of such skills is slowly sprouting in the society and with the changing job market where the shift is towards industry and entrepreneurship and not only inclined towards white collar jobs, acquiring certain skill set is the call of the hour. Besides, the preferences of such skills in the career perspective, we cannot deny the significance of the skills and experience that make individuals good human beings capable of rational thought and action, possessing compassion, empathy, resilience, courage with sound ethical values as envisaged by National Education Policy 2020 and therefore giving priority towards such courses should be of utmost importance. This paper highlights the importance of Value-Added Courses in the higher educational institutions and examines the status of Value-added Courses in the colleges of Nagaland and also identifies challenges faced by the teachers using the interview method on 25 college teachers involved in imparting the course papers. Findings with regard to challenges revealed, there is a lack of clarity in the allocation of value-added courses to different departments, resulting in confusion, also availability of relevant textbooks of the value-added course papers and so on. Collaboration among teachers and feedback mechanisms to gather input from students were recommended as suggestive measures for further improvement