“The IT initiatives of the Directorate of Education, Government of NCT of Delhi entails a comprehensive action plan to usher in ICT enabling governance and academic innovations by addressing issues that have a direct or an indirect bearing on classroom teaching, students performance and accountability of teaching staff including office personnel,” MHRD sources said adding that being an online system the same can be replicated across the country as the educational system in the states are more or less the same.
The project includes interventions such as computer aided learning in multimedia classrooms, admission of students and tracking their details, school information including geographical boundaries, student feedback, inspection of schools, assessment of classroom teaching, online attendance of students through various web based modules, besides continuous and comprehensive evaluation of student's performance.
The Delhi Government's initiative also includes interventions for personnel and office management in the Directorate such as employee information system, transfer posting module, finance module, library management, infrastructure module, file track, processing of vigilance cases, processing of court cases, and maintenance of electronic documents including Annual Confidential Reports (ACRs).
“As an outcome of these initiatives, there has been perceptible change in both administrative and academic output of the Department with human intervention and discretion being minimised resulting in a fair, transparent, accountable and responsive system,” MHRD said.
The entire work flow of the department has been woven into the system such that the users have to work through the system for producing deliverables like mark sheet of a student, rather than entering a data arrived at after a process has taken place, the Ministry said.
The web-based system, developed in-house, has identified needs, mooted solutions, simplest in use and implementation, has been tested and fine-tuned and further complexity is introduced gradually till the system becomes complete.
The Ministry further said that the system has been pro-actively accepted by all the stakeholders. In fact, the teachers union claimed that computerisation has been achieved as a result of their tireless efforts.
With the implementation of the new system, the gap between the pass percentage of private schools and government schools in Delhi has been substantially reduced, besides the number of schools with more than 90 per cent pass percentage have increased from 22 in 2004-05 to 233 in 2006-07 in class X.
Besides, the Department as also anyone can now monitor the attendance of teachers at any given point of time as the information is available in public domain website. What's more, the online admission system has saved innumerable man days of parents because they did not have to make repeated visits to the schools for admissions.
Real-time communication mechanism has been elemental in eliminating the information gap between employees and the accurate and efficient financial management system has been able to ensure almost 100 per cent utilisation of funds in time, the Ministry of Human Resource Development said.
The repairs of schools have improved substantially through the use of online EOR (Extra Ordinary Repairs) tracking system, as it tracks the request of repairs from Principal to the PWD by defined channels, the Ministry stated.
While the Government of Haryana has recently started broadcasting multimedia lessons through Edusat, the Government of Punjab is already in advanced stage of discussion with the Delhi Government for replicating the entire concept in the state.
According to MHRD, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Andaman & Nicobar have also shown interest in implementation of the programmes developed in Delhi in their respective states.
