It aims at converting the physical campus into a virtual and knowledge campus – taking administration, information, communication & management to a whole new world
Education has always been a catalyst for evolutionary changes in the society. But today, with the support of technology, the changes have become revolutionary. It started off with the digitisation of teaching content that popularly got known as ‘e-Content’.
The objective was to supplement the traditional teaching process of ‘chalk and talk’ with multimedia interactive presentations. Somehow, its sudden spurt and excess usage led to the debate if it was impinging on the human touch of learning.
In this state of conflicting thoughts, the stakeholders of the education ecosystem were looking for a new idea that could revolutionise the education ecosystem management, and simplify their complex operation tasks.
The management of content is not a challenge for schools and colleges. The real challenge is the management of operation in delivering that content.
For instance, the teachers spend around 30 percent of their time in preparing and delivering a topic to the students. Seventy percent of the time goes in organising, computing and managing the information for the administration of assessment.
Similarly, the admission staff spends less time in interacting and engaging with the parents and more in the administration of inquiry for the admission process. The management that needs access to the right information at the right time to take vital decisions is in search of a smart tool to solve its problems.
In such scenarios, the implementation of technology in the administration process is the perfect panacea. But, it has to be the right technology at the right
cost.
Unfortunately, every institution that has taken the initiative to build and operate an IT system in-house has not been able to sustain it. The issue is not about the capability of the institution, but the focus on an aspect which is not their core competency.
Also, the rapid change in technology has led to high development and maintenance costs. On top of this, retaining technology talents is a very costly affair, with IT companies paying hefty pay packages.
In the process, the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a technology solution for an institution in the long run becomes prohibitively expensive, especially when a major chunk of its time goes into managing administrative processes rather than adding real value to the academic processes.
Hence, “Outsourcing” of technology management has emerged as a powerful alternative to mitigate the challenges faced by the institutions. With the advent
of cloud computing, the Software as a Service (SaaS) model is replacing the concept of outsourcing.
This is a very powerful model of application usage as required by the institutions and reduces both the Capex and Opex significantly.
At the same time, giving a very high return on investment on this model led to the genesis of the concept of “Digital Campus”, or putting education on the cloud.
Cloud ERP has developed as a revolutionary approach to deploy an ERP solution. It provides flexible, adaptable, scalable, efficient and affordable solutions.
Cloud ERP is providing huge success in delivering data critical to businesses. It helps institutions on cloud have reduced ongoing hardware costs while maintaining greater control over the software.
The concept of “Digital Campus” (Education on Cloud) aims at converting the physical campus into a virtual and knowledge campus – taking administration, information, communication & management to a whole new world.
Similarly, the administrative staff of schools and colleges does not need to search through volumes of registers to compile and consolidate multiple reports on attendance, examination and fees.
They can spend more time on constructive and creative tasks to improve their administrative processes. This entire process of simplification of tasks through automation and integration, to maintenance and up gradation of technology for an institution comes free of cost for any educational institution: school, college, university or coaching centres.
Ultimately, parents reap the benefits of the Digital Campus. In normal circumstances, a parent visits his child’s school/college at least 5-6 times in a year, and spends around Rs 4,000- 5,000 on fuel.
With Digital Campus, parents can avail all these services online without visiting the campus for a small subscription fee of Rs 500 per student per year: one-tenth the cost.
