12th Plan to look at faculty retention: MHRD

In an attempt to increase the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in higher education to 21% by the end of the 12th Five Year Plan period from the current 13.5%, the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) is formulating an action plan to achieve this target. It will discuss the matter in an internal meeting on Tuesday.

Raising the GER would entail an additional enrollment of over 26 million in higher education and almost 1 million school teachers by 2020. “Thus, a concerted strategy to retain best talents in universities for faculty positions and preparing secondary teachers needs to be formulated. It would also require changes in strategies relating to open learning and technology enabled learning,” said a ministry note.

For faculty attraction and retention, the ministry is mulling Human Resource Planning and Management (HRPM) centres at the university level to assess teacher requirement and plan their professional growth research and faculty development programmes such as seminars, training, workshops, incentive and award schemes.

Besides faculty development, the meeting — which will happen at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati — will also discuss vocationalisation through short and medium-term training to achieve 50% enrolment in vocational education sector of higher education by 2020. This is so because even after achieving a GER of 30%, there would be 150 million or more youth who would require vocational education, the ministry says.

Encouragement to private investment is next on the agenda with substantial role of private sector at diploma and degree programmes. On the research and innovation front, the government may look at Sector Innovation Councils that would provide platforms for innovation right from school to higher education and would be developed alongwith at least 50 centres of innovation in different institutions of higher learning.

In fact, the note asks for appropriate amendments in the Copyright Law to foster creativity and to keep it in harmony with the features of the World Intellectual Property Organization. Also on the agenda of Tuesday’s meeting is the much ignored local languages along with book promotion and reading habits.

Source: The Financial Express, July 26, 2011

How top Indian IT companies help higher ed institutions

Post the placement season, educational institutes are seeking help from information technology (IT) companies to automate their systems, as the number of students and applications increase every year. Companies such as IBM, TCS and HCL Infosystems are offering campus automation software, enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions and education management solutions to educational institutes to automate their work flow.

From brochures, profiles, online lessons to placements to managing alumni database and making finance and accounting divisions paperless, they are helping institutes like Faculty of Management Studies (FMS), Delhi, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) and Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS), Mumbai, get more efficient.

“We will be able to manage the increasing scale of work with the same number of employees. Also, it will make us more globally competitive. Imagine an executive pursuing a course who can log on to the system anytime, anywhere in the world while he travels, avoiding the hassle of visiting the campus to select courses, attend classes or even make payments. That’s a great convenience,” says Debashish Sanyal, Dean, School of Business Management, NMIMS.

At TISS, for instance, the number of applications went up to 20,000 for 680 seats this year from 3,000 applications for 120 seats in 2004, which necessitated a gradual shift towards handling the process online. “We have been getting outside help, besides our internal resources to speed up the process and stick to the deadline of processing applications. Online registrations will help lessen this pressure and make it more efficient,” says S. Parasuraman, Director, TISS.

Here’s how the automated system helps across levels: When students apply online for various courses, they get automatic acknowledgements and intimations at each stage of the admission procedure. But this is a transition phase, where offline applications are also accepted.

The cut-off for each department is fed into the system and the students are short-listed. Call letters are automatically generated and sent by email and also through post. Selected lists are uploaded automatically to the web. Fee payment is also automated with the challans printed. Bar code scanners are used to read the roll numbers from the challans and expedite the process. Identity cards are printed in-house and instantly handed over to students. Students can register for electives through the college websites like universities abroad, and staff can enter student attendance and grades on the intranet.

Question bank modules are used to store the questions set by the examiners. Seating plans are given by the system eliminating the time consuming manual process. Mark sheets with security features can be printed through the system. Students with arrears can register for the supplementary exams online. Overall, colleges and universities are managing organisations and processes better.

NMIMS has already invested Rs. 13 million on blackboard technology over a five-year period and is now working a large-scale SAP implementation with IBM’s help. It will cover a wide array of activities from managing the entire student lifecycle to buying books online, archiving results and keeping track of management spends. It has spent Rs. 50 million on this project in a year’s time.

At Birla Institute of Management Technology (BIMTECH), Greater Noida, TCS is implementing a comprehensive campus management ERP system, for the past one year, which covers all activities from admission to placements. Besides, it is also in discussions with a specialist firm on archiving the guest lectures, seminars and workshops. This will have the added facility of converting phonetic matter to text. All the investment and the effort these institutes are putting in, leads to a substantial cost saving as well, they say.

“It will take another two years to complete the project and we expect 25-30% savings on the cost on processes that were earlier offline,” says Rajan Saxena, VC, NMIMS. And in some cases, it can even save around 50% of the cost incurred otherwise, according to TISS’ Parasuraman. “Efficient use of such systems can bring in huge gains, not only in terms of speed and accuracy but also in terms of cost,” he says.

This also means a huge opportunity for companies in this space. “A recent research study by Springboard Research says India’s education sector will step up its IT spending from an estimated $356 million in 2008 to $704 million in 2012, reflecting a CAGR of 19% during 2007-2012. That’s good news for players in this domain,” says Rothin Bhattacharya, EVP, HCL Infosystems.

Source: The Economic Times (Online Edition), July 26, 2011

Pilot project for digital academic repository complete

The government has moved step closer to creating a national academic depository that’s expected to help curb forgery and make verifications of education credentials easier and quicker. Human resource development (HRD) minister Kapil Sibal said on Monday a pilot to assess the feasibility of this depository has been completed.

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), which carried out the pilot, has digitized the education certificates of all the students who cleared its class XII examination in 2011. Certificates of aspiring teachers who have appeared for the Central Teacher Eligibility Test (C-TET) will also be available in digital format. The results will be declared on Tuesday.

“This will help in curbing forgery of education credentials. The menace of fake certificates can be controlled through this,” Sibal said, giving a lowdown on the process of verifying digital certificates. The minister said the recent instances of fake certificates that plagued Delhi University can be tackled easily through this measure. In June, Delhi University authorities found that a number of students had submitted fake certificates while seeking admissions under a certain quota.

The Central Depository Services India Ltd. (CDSL) and the National Securities Depository Ltd. (NSDL) helped CBSE conduct the pilot. “It was done by both the depositories with no initial cost to the ministry. It will remain free for CBSE for next three months; but after that it has to pay certain fees,” Sibal explained.

CBSE Chairperson Vineet Joshi said the depository will make it easier for employers and educational institutes to verify the credentials of prospective workers and students. It will also help do away with the fear of losing physical certificates. According to CRP HR Services, a background screening firm based in Mumbai, discrepancies are found in 15% of the education credentials submitted by aspiring job seekers.

“We are also moving a Bill on this (the depository) in the coming Parliament session (that begins on 1 August),” Sibal said. Once the Bill is passed, it will mandate digitizing all educational certificates of school boards, colleges and universities. “The depositories will be soon deploying their own agents. Anyone can approach them for digitizing, but these agencies will first verify whether their certificates are original or fake,” Joshi said.

Source: Mint, July 26, 2011

IIMs revamp CAT examination format

The Indian Institutes of Mangement (IIMs) on Monday announced a new format of the common admission test (CAT), with fewer papers and questions and allowing more time to answer them. CAT 2011 will have two sections instead of three. The first will test quantitative ability and data interpretation, which was a separate paper earlier. The second paper will test verbal ability and logical reasoning.

IIMs have also reduced the number of questions to 60 from 75, with 30 questions in each paper, and increased the total time limit for completing the test to 140 minutes from 120 minutes. But both the papers will have to be attempted sequentially; once an aspirant completes the first paper, he/she will not be allowed to go back to it.

“These two sections will be implemented sequentially with separate time limits. The (duration of the) examination will be 140 minutes. Candidates will have 70 minutes to answer 30 questions within each section which will have an on-screen countdown timer,” the IIMs and Prometric Inc., which will conduct the tests, said in a joint statement. “Once the time ends for the first section, they will move to the second and will no longer be able to go back. Although new in the computer-based version of CAT, this format was previously practised in some of the earlier paper-and-pencil years.”

The number of test days has been retained at 20. CAT 2011 will begin on 22 October and 18 November to allow candidates the flexibility of choosing a test date. “We are confident that CAT 2011 is going to help us in identifying the appropriate candidates for our programmes, and that the examination will be fair and equitable,” said Janakiraman Moorthy, CAT 2011 convenor and a professor at IIM-Kolkata. IIM-Raipur Director B.S. Sahay said fewer papers will help students as CAT cut-off marks are decided on the basis of cut-off marks for each section. “Now there will be two cut-offs to be considered instead of three,” he said.

CAT 2011 will provide a 15-minute tutorial before the test begins. It will be conducted across 36 cities, including the newly added Jammu, Dehradun and Bhilai. Amit Agnihotri, head of MBAuniverse.com, a management education tracking portal, said the new format is progressive as it will be easier on students. “Increasing exam duration is a huge plus,” he said.

When CAT went online in 2009, thousands of IIM aspirants were hit by a lack of practice, little knowledge about the navigational keys and technical glitches. Around 17,000 students re-took the test, resulting in bad publicity for the premier management school and protests by students. This also delayed the declara- tion of results by three weeks.

In 2010, the IIMs and Prometric delivered a glitch-free exam across 33 cities. Last year, at least 204,000 candidates registered to take the CAT compared with 242,000 in 2009. Currently, there are 13 IIMs in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Kolkata, Indore, Kashipur, Kozhikode, Lucknow, Shillong, Ranchi, Rohtak, Shillong, Tiruchirappalli and Udaipur.

Source: Mint, July 26, 2011