Good education depends on faculty who are engaged, supported, and continuously reflecting on their practice. At a small institution this can happen informally; as a university grows, it requires deliberate structures. Since early 2025, I have headed the Academic Office at Azim Premji University, which was set up to build exactly these: to support and develop teaching practice, to create enabling policies and governance, and to put in place mechanisms for continuous improvement.
Supporting and developing teaching practice is central to the Academic Office's work. A two-part faculty induction programme was designed to introduce new faculty not just to institutional processes but to a community of educators. The first pedagogy conclave, a space for faculty to share and discuss their teaching practice, was held in January 2026. We are also working on technology resources for instructors, including ongoing improvements to the university's learning management system, and are engaged in a sustained conversation with faculty and students about artificial intelligence in teaching and learning, with the goal of developing a university-wide AI policy.
As the university has grown, its academic governance has had to evolve. A significant restructuring of the course and programme approval process was carried out to make it workable at scale, including revising the roles of approval bodies and building the capacity of school-level curriculum committees to take on greater responsibility. Work is also underway on guidelines for course design, on regulations for hybrid programmes, and on a review of academic regulations.
Building feedback mechanisms, for individual instructors as well as for the institution, is the third strand of the work. An audit of course pages on the learning management system provides a baseline picture of how academic processes are being followed. A course reflection exercise, to be completed by all instructors at the end of each course, has been designed to help faculty document their practice and identify revisions while the course is still fresh. We have also begun encouraging mid-course feedback, which gives instructors timely information to adjust their courses, and are developing a process for periodic analysis of learning data across programmes.