Share labs, libraries with other institutes, HEIs told

CHENNAI: The University Grants Commission (UGC) has issued guidelines to ensure that Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) adopt measures to share their infrastructure with other HEIs for optimum use of the available resources by charging a nominal amount.

The additional revenue would help the host institution to maintain its resources in a better way. For this, HEIs were instructed to share resources like libraries, laboratories, and equipment during free time with the students and researchers of other institutions.

The guidelines said it was very important to determine the available resources of the host institution, which could be shared with the guest institution and thereafter steps be taken to facilitate the process of sharing. The institutions should bring in a mechanism for the onboarding of the guest students to enable access to the resources of the host institution by providing unique identity cards to the learners.

The UGC said similarly e-books, databases, and online resources should be provided access to the students of both institutions through central licences applicable to all the collaborating universities.

It should be ensured that sharing of resources does not give rise to copyright violations or data privacy infringements. In cases of science, the resources such as labs should be identified and shared based on the skill mapping between the collaborating institutions at PhD, PG, and UG levels.

When the collaborating institutions were distantly situated, the sharing of physical infrastructure is foreclosed and the only possibility of sharing is that of academic resources. Such academic resources which should be shared include institutional learning repositories such as online lectures, videos, learning materials, and access to the learning management system.