By Dr. Ashraf Zainabi

A campus produces wastewater, leaf litter and an energy bill, and it shelters a biodiversity of its own. 

Students can treat the water, compost the leaves with worms, survey the wildlife and investigate the power the buildings consume, and a degree built around such work would look little like a list of lectures. 

Design Your Own Degree, or DYoD, promises that degree.

I teach DYoD courses at IUST Awantipora, and I hold that within four years it should become the soul of NEP 2020. The claim is conscious and calculated. 

The policy is in its sixth year, and its early years went to building structures, testing ideas and persuading institutions that change was possible. The next four have to move what works out of experiment and into scale.

NEP 2020 rebuilt the architecture of higher education around flexibility, multidisciplinary learning, experiential education, creativity, critical thinking and choice. A redesigned building can still house the same old classroom, however, so the change that counts happens in pedagogy. 

DYoD puts the student, rather than the timetable, at the centre. 

Undergraduates get room to explore disciplines, connect knowledge and discover their direction, while the instructor moves from transmitting information toward mentoring and guiding. 

The policy provides the architecture, and DYoD can........

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