While private universities are growing by leaps and bounds, a crucial aspect that remains unchanged is the recognition of the university by some authorised regulatory body. Almost in every inspection done by UGC, an entire list of fake universities get unearthed emphasising on the need for academically recognised universities. We have given maximum weightage to National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) accredited universities and used the number of courses and departments in the university to validate the scores.

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Top 10 Universities with High-Quality Infrastructure
India’s Top 60 Private and Deemed Universities
Top 10 Universities with a Global Connect
Top 10 Universities of Academic Excellence
Top 10 Faculty-Rich Universities
Top Universities Across Zones
India’s Top 60 Private and Overall Deemed Universities-Ranking

Prof Michael Thorne, Vice Chancellor, Anglia Ruskin University shares his opinion on Foreign Universities Bill in an interview with Mohd Ujaley.

What are the major trends you see in global education?
I think, without any doubt, the future of world for two reasons depends on education. One is to bring the world together for political stability, the more we understand about each other, the better we engage,and secondly, the economies of all the countries are going in the same direction,and will depend on how educated our work force is, so obviously being involved in university education, the most important thing to me is to get educated as many people as possible upto university level.
I also see lot of partnerships happening for capacity building. India is a very vibrant democracy and we need to engage with each other at various levels to improve the quality, increase capacity of our university and teachers.

How do you look at bill pending in Indian Parliament to regulate the operation of foreign university in India?
We look at it other way around, in a country where such partnership are already allowed, it has benefited them in providing
quality education and added to the capacity of a country to get more people educated to university level without a country to spend a lot for making new buildings etc.
We are hopeful that Bill will be passed because this legislation has potential to bring foreign universities to India, thereby increasing the capacity of India to educate more people. Also worldwide, there is shortage of quality staff, so partnerships can bridge this gap. For example, the UK is adding the capacity of university education of Malaysia for many years, although there is still quite a lot Malaysian students come to the UK, but there also very large number of Malaysian students who are being educated same degree in Malaysia in partnership with Malaysian universities, that has really worked well for both the countries.

Digital Classrooms at the School
We have initiated the process of digitisation with 54 classrooms to synergise digital learning and our current teaching-learning practices. We will plan to extend digitisation to all our classrooms.
With tomorrow being increasingly competitive, we strive to provide all our students the support they need to learn, grow and develop. Our objective is to provide our teachers with means to make more and better contribution in learning process of students.

Digital classrooms and lab set-up
 Classroom digitisation, by deployment of iken School, is the basic solution offered by Mexus Education. It spreads over infrastructure, set-up, digital platform and content repository of learning resources as well as continuous support to ensure optimum use and upkeep of the set-up.

Content platform and repository
Mexus Education offers comprehensive multi-format digital content repository, running over hours, for teaching topics of entire K-12 segment. Lessons are re-created in several engaging multimedia ormats including live videos, movie, animations,case studies.
These digital classrooms are complemented with Virtual Labs that include experiments of Science, applicationdriven solutions for Maths and experiences of skill-based language into the very classrooms.

Services on board
Digital Classrooms offer flexibility to plan content flow for a lesson in the manner that matches teaching style of our tutors with aptitude and learning orientation of classrooms.
iKen Classrooms also provide us with exclusive digital expert who continuously supports lesson-planning, classroom preparation and content counselling to ensure uninterrupted teaching learning support.

Student’s Feedback

“It is easier to understand anatomy and other such topics by seeing them rather than by listening to their descriptions. It becomes even easier to understand when we see it in movies with different perspectives. These activities, movies, demonstrations have made long classes much more fun and enjoyable. Studies do not feel like studying at all now,” says a student

Teacher’s Feedback

“iKen Library has made it easier for teachers using these classrooms to explain complex concepts in a way that students would find easy to understand. Conducting classroom tests are not as difficult as they used to be. With iKen Evaluate I, now, have tests on every topic,” says a teacher

Raising academic standards
iKen School Eco-System facilitatedinstruction and explanation of complex topics while ensuring that every student in the class gets individual attention. Teachers are required to ensure that entire class reaches the basic level of understanding on the topic.
Topic-wise formative assessment system has transferred the responsibility of performance partially to the teachers. Teachers have means to ensure that a basic understanding level for a particular topic is achieved by entire classroom.
With focus on child development and memorising capacity, students are now expected to understand the concepts over mere memorising, as they are assessed through different modes beyond written exams viz. quick quizzes, activities, experiments, concept-applications, etc.

Evaluation of effect
Evaluation of the system and its impact on the learning environment is measured in two ways:
First is the evaluation of students through iKen Evaluate, which allows measuring the understanding levels of students immediately upon completion of topics and periodically. Secondly, from the feedback of teachers, Mexus connects with teachers on regular intervals to assess and ensure adoption of new pedagogy.

Enhanced teaching-learning
Ease of Navigation and Usage: The content is streamlined and catalogued on various parameters like class, subject and topic. This makes the navigation more userfriendly and ensures the ease of access.
Age-appropriate content, localised characters, content and contexts make it easier for children to listen& understand the resources and content ; as they relate with the situations and characters.
Integrated formative assessment system allows teachers to identify the comprehension levels of class on the topic instructed immediately.

Expections from future
The new innovations which we expect in the future is more into gamification which would help students enjoy the learning even more, resulting into enhanced retention levels.
Children enjoy playing and if the games can teach all the concepts that the students have to learn over a period of time, the teaching-learning process would reach the next level, bringing about a paradigm shift in what we perceive as effective education.

An eye-catching feature about most private universities in the country is their infrastructure. We have considered the campus area, number of laboratories and ICT-based learning as some of the key parameters for ranking the universities in this category. Whereas, it was an easy task to get the details of the campus area of the universities, number of laboratories was not mentioned in many cases. To rate the ICT infrastructure, we used the website information and also interacted with leading ICT solution providers in the higher education sector to understand the keenness of universities in installation of such solutions in their campus.
Amity University, Noida, topped the chart because of the high rating in the criteria of the ratio of the number of laboratories and the total campus area. Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham University figured among the Top 5 because of its ICT infrastructure and good laboratories.

View More:
India’s Top 60 Private and Deemed Universities
Top 10 Academically Recognised Universities
Top 10 Universities of Academic Excellence
Top 10 Faculty-Rich Universities
Top 10 Universities with a Global Connect
Top Universities Across Zones
India’s Top 60 Private and Overall Deemed Universities-Ranking

There is a big shift in the classrooms of today with the intervention of technology. Beas DevRalhan, CEO, Next Education, highlights latest digital classroom solutions available for schools.

Please share USPs of your disgital classrooms over other players existing in this domain.
Our digital classroom package offers the USPs of – content, innovative technology,Control system and support for teachers.
Out Content is mapped to syllabus of all boards such as CBSE, ICSE, IGCSE and 23 state boards. We have innovative technology framework, which allows content to play in classrooms irrespective of connection to server. Our remote control system enables user to control 95 percent features with only 5 buttons. Therefore, teacher is free to walk across the classroom even while using this system.
We provide end-to-end support for the teacher from lesson planning to assessment of students to generating student report cards along with high degree of flexibility, thus providing the user an option to create lessons, syllabi,etc as per needs.

How can institutions leverage their existing infrastructure to upgrade to digital classrooms?
The TeachNext solution provides everything required to set up a digital classroom in a school, if at all a school has existing infrastructure, such as a computer, audio visual system, interactive whiteboard, etc, we can install the TeachNext server and enable these computers to connect to it to stream content. eachNext provides an end-to-end solution right from cabling to setting up of the server system in the school.

Tools and resources available for teachers
Lesson plans help the teacher to plan for a class	Interactive content includes 2D and 3D visual content along with voice-overs to explain and help students visualise concepts
Next Studio includes interactive tools to draw on the white board.It helps make the switch between traditional blackboard and the new system	Next Dictionary is an interactive dictionary which can be used on the fly
Next Tools include quick reference tools such as logarithm tables,graph plotter, periodic table, etc.	CCE assessments includes questions for formative and summative assessments as well as for testing HOTS (higher order thinking skills)
Question bank/Test creator/ exercises offer more than 80,000 questions that teachers can use	Library resources from BBC and Britannica as well as simulations and experiments for science concepts

Please shed light on new innovations.
Personalised learning at individual space is the next big frontier. Currently,institutions pay the same attention to each student, and each child learns at the same pace. Self-learn systems operate at a different pace from the classroom. The next big move will be a technology-enabled, integrated system in which the student is at the centre. Students will be able to move from device to device, choose their learning style,and excel at understanding the concept rather than just the words. For this reason Next Education has launched a series of Labs which help schools enable this for students.
This involves a big attitudinal shift.Schools need to be prepared to implement  various new aspects of learning -BYOD (bring your own device), multiple intelligences, big-data across various products, and an integrated ERP that allows the school to collate data across multiple systems.

There is no doubt about a great future of education in India. Yet, the way to reach out to a great future still has to be thought about. Cloud is emerging as the medium to make quality education accessible to all. Cloud-based solutions are now widely accepted for two main reasons : Minimised costeverywhere of ownership and operations, and anywhere, anytime learning potential. But still it is not understood, and used the way it can be used for its real benefits especially in education. The first thing is to understand what Cloud means, and what it can do for the education segment. Unlike its synonym Cloud, it is simply a metaphor for various data networks generally located remotely and accessed via the internet, and has nothing to do with the stratosphere. Various apps like Google Drive, Facebook, Gmail, Drop Box, Web conferencing, ERP as a service, etc are the most common examples of Cloud, where the entire data is saved and processed in some remote data centre. Simplifying the Cloud, Lokesh Mehra, Director-Education Advocacy, Microsoft defines, “Cloud in simple terms is a network of shared resources that can be located anywhere. The main advantage that comes with cloud is: it’s cheaper, scalable, and maintenance free for the end user. Cloud computing can be viewed typically as a large ecosystem, which is not owned by any educational organisation. Within this ecosystem, learners and educators act as the users and producers of cloud-based learning services, with complete control over the choice, use and sharing – providing learners anywhere, anytime learning. Faster, Cheaper, Reliable and on Demand – the cloud truly has a green lining.”

Endless scope

Cloud computing has a tremendous opportunity to provide greater cost efficiency, flexibility in schools while improving the learning outcomes. One of the most interesting reasons to adopt cloud is that schools’ need not invest in the implementation, maintenance issues, and buying new software everyday. Data volumes are going high; it helps in keeping away from server and storage worries.

Implementation cost saves from buying new hardware or software updating cost. Schools have to pay just monthly subscription fees to get all that done in a hassle-free manner and helps them to focus more on operations and on enhancing learning delivery.

Nilaya Varma, Managing Director, Health & Public Service, Accenture India, shares the benefits of Cloud computing, “The power of Cloud computing in education can be used best in the areas of data and content management, document and records management, online learning resources, web-delivery of classroom trainings, and knowledge management. Education in India in the next few years will move away from public universities to private universities, Cloud will help these universities with optimising resources for physical infrastructure by using technology infrastructure, on a per-use basis. Content across these universities will be more standardised, which shall enable students to transfer across  universities. Content management will be a service that these institutions will be interested to leverage.”

Cloud’s power to offer anywhere,anytime learning will penetrate educationto far flung areas, where there isscarcity of institutions, teachers, andunavailability of courses with the benefitsof collaborative and peer-learning.Highlighting the potential of Cloud,G Raghavan, Chief Executive, CareerBuilding Solutions, NIIT Ltd says, “Thebreakthrough Cloud technology hasthe potential to transform the educationindustry in India. Through Cloudhigh quality educational programmescan reach to the remotest corners of thecountry, thus addressing the dilemmaof scalability and quality in educationthat our country is currently facing.Backed by powerful technologies, suchas NIIT Cloud Campus, the collaborativeplatform puts the power to learnin the hands of the students by makinglearning with buddies, and learning anytime and anywhere possible.”

Dr Shashi Throor, Minister of State for Human Resource Development, says: “Cloud has tremendous potential in India. It has the potential to make available massive amount of education database across the country. Regularly updated database will give students and teachers opportunity to learn what they miss in the classroom. And teachers also can stay updated with latest knowledge resources. Potential is enormous but challenges are also there, like power infrastructure and the lack of last mile connectivity. We are yet to have the basic infrastructure required in taking advantage of technology. Technology is moving fast, and I believe that story will be totally different, sooner.”

Students are demanding more technology services from their schools, and the schools in turn are keeping pace by adopting newer and better technologies.
Cloud brings a range of solutions that are not offered by the traditional IT. Cloud computing is available in many ways from software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and now emerging in the education is Content as a Service.

Lokesh Mehra further shares the details of three important set of offerings from Cloud:

SaaS: Software as a Service (SaaS) provides schools with different applications that can accessed from anywhere, such as emails or different educational applications. It gives the benefit of collaboration among students. Microsoft Office 365 for Education provides free email, websites, online document editing and storage, IM and video conferencing helping students easily connect with faculty, experts, and one another to inspire, research, and form new ideas. PaaS: Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides users with tools that allow them to create and host the applications. The tools available are cheap, and can be used by students to learn and create loads of applications. It allows you to dynamically scale, as demands fluctuate. IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service  (Iaas) gives the freedom of storing your data on the Cloud, and then accessing it from anywhere. This option is normally used in educational institutions for uploading the assignments and other documents that can be used by students from anywhere. During admission or result cycles the load increases, and instead of investing in CAPEX, an institute can leverage the Cloud.

Important for skills development

“The benefit of Cloud lies in its ability to service, to assess people, and to automatically integrate them to build and discuss in communities”

Cloud will play an important role in thedevelopment of skills. People can upgradetheir skills by anywhere, anytimelearning. Ashutosh Chadha, Director-Corporate Affairs Group, Intel SouthAsia says, “We need to understand howeducation will mature over the next 5-15years. Cloud will take a bigger manifestation.We are going to a situation wherepersonalised, anywhere, anytime learningis extremely important. So the Cloudshould not be looked as only a repositoryof content. We should look at Cloud asan interactive learning medium basedon what we want to learn and then beable to assess, and immediately curate it.If I am taking Xth grade examination onlineand it finds that I am weak in algebraor differentiation or integration, etc.Next time I go to learning it should talkabout those modules, which are relevantto me. This is personalised learning, becausethis is how we see education movingover the next 15 years. It is going tobe here and now education. People aregoing to move from one skill to anotheras per need, and they may not have timeto go through the entire course, butwant those specific things. The benefitof Cloud lies in its ability to service, toassess people, and to automatically integratethem to build and discuss in communities.Community learning is goingto be very important.

On the flip side

“Stringent copyright and plagiarism laws, data integrity, data security and data privacy are  the need of the hour”

Cloud does offer some challenges in terms of security issues, or accessibility problems due to slower Internet speeds in India. The control over the content available in the Cloud may be limited forthe users. Also a shift from the existingtraditional infrastructure to the Cloud may prove to be a tricky and difficult task for the educational institutions, as data sovereignty may be a question for government institutes. But these challenges are being addressed by the industry. Offerings with greater security and more reliable networks are being rolled out.

In India, there are various challenges when it comes to the delivery of quality education, and reaching out to the peripheries. To address these issue Cloud has a huge potential. Commentingon the challenges of cloud, Nilaya Verma adds: “There are a few challenges that we foresee for Cloud in education  to become a reality. The biggest of them would be the regulatory environment

in a changing political landscape. Stringent copyright and plagiarism laws, data integrity, data security and data privacy are the need of the hour. Some of the challenges can be addressed by having a well-defined, documented data governance framework that has tight oversight and controls. Also, proper risk mitigation steps need to put in place to address data security issues. The firms in India can leverage of the successes and failures of  vernance challenges.”

(Dr Sankaran Raghunathan, Dean, The National Management School, India, is an expert in transcript or document security matters)

One issue that is being addressed across countries in higher education is the secure generation, distribution, and, subsequent verification of transcripts. Traditionally, transcripts are printed on paper and delivered to students. In order to secure the transcript, universities started the use of a security paper to print the transcript on, hoping that a secure media also secures the data. The cost of such a secure paper is passed on to the student.

Verification of transcripts issued by universities poses its own logistical nightmares. Employers who receive transcripts from graduates or universities who receive transcripts from applicants need to have these paper transcripts verified for authenticity. Such verification is done directly with the issuing university; this is time consuming and expensive. Employers engage third-party agencies for such verification. The issuing university needs to devote resources to process requests for verification.

In order to avoid such verification requests, universities established the practice of taking the request for transcripts from students and sending the transcripts directly to the final recipient; this way the receiving university or employer gets the transcript directly from the issuing university and therefore further verification become redundant.  However, the issue of securing the paper transcript still remains. In spite of using security paper for transcripts, tampering and fraudulent transcripts could not be avoided.

Drawbacks

The EDI system can only work when the member institutions harmonise their systems to generate, send and receive transcript data in a particular format. Therefore, the EDI system works well only within a system of universities within a state system. Recipients outside the system therefore are unable to participate.

The Central Repository method suffers from the general flaws of any centralised system – the need to have a huge infrastructure, security of such a central database, sharing of student records by universities with a third party are not insignificant issues. The very weight of  such a repository brings it down.

The eTranscript or PDF transcript system, while elegant in its electronic automated process for handling requests from students and generating transcripts and directly distributing the transcript to the end recipient suffers from one fundamental flaw of requiring the originating university to share the student record with the third party which uses the software system to generate the PDF transcript. Legislations such as the FERPA in the United States prohibit such sharing of student records with third parties. In addition, this system also requires high expenditure on new software systems and hosting infrastructure.

Imagine a situation where universities can generate transcripts either on ordinary paper or electronically in a very secure format that cannot be  tampered with; distribute this secure transcript without the need for sharing the data with any third party; with the transcript so issued being verifiable at any time or place via the Internet without recourse to the original database or the issuing University.

The solution that meets all these requirementswill be discussed in the next part.