Knowledge
Schools churning out better learning outcomes and higher productivity with e-gov platforms
IT firms like MGRM Net Ltd. are helping aided and unaided schools in adopting e-governance platforms. Technology is aimed to increasing productivity, tracking student’s progress, reduce administrative burdens of teachers.
The past few months have seen a sea change for Ashok Singh, principal of a Kendriya Vidyalaya in south Delhi, who is merely 2 years away from his retirement. But it’s change for the better. “Now I am more of a teacher,” he says about a job he loves, and “less of an administrator”. Of late, he claims to be taking more classes and doing less file work.
Singh gives credit to the adoption of technology under the e-governance programme for improving the performance of his school as well as that of its teachers. “It would be tough to quantify now as we are a few months into the new system, but soon you will see the difference.”
Singh’s school is one of the many pioneering institutes that are embracing e-governance to enhance productivity, improve teacher performance, track students progress and better educational engagement and administration.
Assisting them are firms like MGRM Net Ltd, an IT company with expertise in education e-governance. MGRM is working with both private and government schools across the country and helping them transition to e-governance platforms. “Teachers earlier complained about administrative work and how it is affecting their career. Things have started changing… besides improving the education outcomes, I see e-governance aiding the careers of teachers,” Singh adds.
Alka Sharma, a mathematics teacher at Ahlcon International School in east Delhi, agrees. “Manual intervention in school is reducing, leading to reduced administrative burden on teaching staff,” she says, adding that “e-governnace has brought ease to teachers, who are now looking to leverage technology in improving their student engagement like customized tutorials, better pedagogy and improved teaching-learning atmosphere”.
A brief intro of e-governance
“It is multifaceted. Students, management, teachers, government policy requirements and, most importantly, education outcomes are tracked, reducing manual intervention of each of the aspects. What you get is quantifiable outcomes,” says Partha Mohanty, senior vice-president (technical) at MGRM.
“Data is not as important as data analytics. For a school management, if it gets the analysis and possible implications, it helps in teaching-learning of students, in career growth of staff, in better management of finances and the overall ecosystem,” says Rohini Ahluwalia, chairman of Ahlcon International School.
“We track every possible activity of our students, from both professional and personal points of view. It helps in classifying students into groups so that the below-average can be converted into above-average and more,” says Ahluwalia.
How does it work?
The platform is comprehensive enough to track every activity, right from admission day to the student’s school graduation day. “We know what books a student is taking from the library, how their parents have reacted to their performance and why a student’s grades have dropped. The outcome: teachers can engage in solving the problems,” says Chetna Sabharwal, a teacher at Ahlcon International.
“A couple of months back we realized that a section of students was not doing well in economics, English and geography. We chipped in with remedials for 20-odd days for those students,” adds Singh of Kendriya Vidyalaya.
For teachers, the e-governance platform works like an automated performance appraisal system as their activities—academic and non-academic—get logged.
Mohanty points out to a traditional pain point that e-governance is addressing today—the reams of data that both state and central governments seek from schools for designing schemes and for policymaking. He says the e-governance platform by MGRM enables schools to provide data for programmes like “district information system on education, shaala darpan and e-pathsala” from a single platform. “Right now we have put some 1,185 central schools, their 12 lakh students and 50,000 staff on one single e-governance platform,” Mohanty says.
Now that the schools are entering into the e-governance network, the Union human resource development ministry too is seeking to adopt e-governance via its “shaala darpan” scheme to be able to track the performance of students and teachers across all government schools.
Shaala darpan aims to adopt the e-governance platform to track student’s performance, improve teacher’s productivity, better parent’s engagement with school operations. The plan is to have every task from leave management to exam record keeping on a single online platform.
The government is planning to improve student engagement, base education inputs on proper assessment and gap analysis, focusing on mathematics and science from Class I, besides improving school infrastructure.