The director of Tallaght Regional Technical College, Dublin, has told about 90 part-time information technology students that he does not have enough staff to teach their courses this year.
Dr Columb Collins was addressing a specially convened meeting with the students yesterday evening to discuss how they might continue their studies this year on a scaled-down basis, or defer them until next year.
Last Friday, 70 part-time students on the one-year diploma course and two-year certificate course, and about 20 wishing to move from the diploma to a degree course, received a letter from the college telling them it had been unable to appoint enough suitably qualified and experienced lecturers to put on the courses this year.
Dr Collins told The Irish Times the shortage of lecturers was due to the "state of frenetic activity in the whole IT area". Because of the huge demand form IT lecturers, it was difficult to get them to work "after hours" to teach the evening and Saturday classes which make up Tallaght RTC's part-time courses. "We need a realisation at government level that part-time students need to be fully resourced," he said.
"Tallaght is now two RTCs - one with 1,700 full-time day programme students, the other with 1,700 part-time students. At least the core of every programme, full-time and part-time, should be serviced by full-time permanent staff."