Reinventing Education System with Next Generation School ERP

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July 10, 2013

Razi Ahmed, Country Manager / CEO – India, Edmatix Information Systems, a subsidiary of Mazik Tech Solutions talks about how the company is helping educational institutions to achieve their academic goals and bring people together by removing gaps between parents, teachers and students

Please shed some light on Edmatix Solutions.
Edmatix is the education ERP division of Mazik Tech solutions which provides multi lingual educational solutions and services. Our products are built on latest Microsoft, Web 2.0 technologies to make it more user friendly and cater the education needs of various school boards such as state SSC, CBSE, ICSE and several others that exists in India it also caters colleges, training institutes and universities.

How Edmatix is helping Education Institutions across India?
Edmatix is helping education industry achieve their academic goals and set standards. We are totally committed to helping education community; reinvent education system to improve their education standards and student achievements to outperform in several state and central aptitude tests. Our education products are designed to help you support the lifecycle of active learning, inspires student success and create technology enabled environment.
Our products are built to allow seamless customizations to meet the needs of every school in the education community.
Edmatix has been committed to providing the best software solutions for education industry and helping schools maintain their competitive edge with their counter parts in the education market. Our mission is to provide schools a very comprehensive, easy to use and most cost effective solutions. We help schools and institutions to achieve their education goals by improving education standard, student grades, achievements and ofcourse achieve their target revenues to help them expand their services. Improvement in student grades and education standards will help schools to send more students to colleges and universities where they can be selected for the most demanding courses and programs to support Indian growth in technology and sciences.

How do you manage support for your existing customers when you are adding schools almost every week?
Along with our local support, we are constantly monitoring the industry and working with our customers who are driving the functionality of our software. We are committed to exceeding our customer’s expectations. We completely understand that the software you buy today needs to last for decades, grow and adapt with your school’s changing needs and requirements. We follow a strict change management and control for every release of each new enhancement. Our implementation and support teams are very well connected with all our customers, they keep all customers very well informed about our new features and enhancement to existing features in our releases. We believe in training our customers that to reduce the number support calls that we receive and help us use our valuable time to further build the software. We value each of our customers irrespective of their size and revenue.

What is the mantra of your rapid growth in a little span of time?
Edmatix is built using the technology stack such as .NET framework, Silverlight, Entity framework, CSLA and Reporting services. The framework is designed keeping in mind the type of industry this software is going to serve. Every School works differently: our 11 years of experience serving educational industry tells us that no two schools works the same way. Our ability to customize our solution to every school needs is one of the main reasons for our rapid growth.
Inexperienced Technology Users: We totally understand that teacher’s job is to teach students and not spend lot of time managing student grades, attendance, lesson plans and etc. we have designed our system keeping in mind that teachers are not the regular users of computers. Our intuitive and consistent layouts in every modules helps teacher understand
quickly how to use the system.
Low Internet Bandwidth: We understand that not all schools and educational institutions afford to have high bandwidth internet connections. Our system is designed to work on low internet bandwidth using our software’s ability to safely and
securely cache repeated data on local machines to help perform faster transactions without any waiting times.

Top 10 Universities of Academic Excellence

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digitalLEARNING Network

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July 10, 2013

The academic quality of any educational institution can be best judged based on the quality of research papers being produced by the institute, the total number of students and also the number of PhD faculty members. We calculated the faculty-student ratio and also the ratio of PhD faculty and student ratio to validate the rankings.

Academic Excellence (100)
Parameter	Score
Faculty/Student Ratio	60
Research Activities/Research Papers Published	20
Industry-Academia Interface	20

Rank	Name of University	City	State
1	Manipal University	Manipal	Karnataka
2	Lovely Professional University	Phagwara	Punjab
3	Bharati Vidyapeeth	Pune	Maharashtra
4	SRM University	Chennai	Tamil Nadu
5	Kalinga Insitute of Industrial Technology	Bhubaneswar	Odisha
6	Birla Institute of Technology & Science	Pilani	Rajasthan
7	Sharda University Greater	Noida	Uttar Pradesh
8	Koneru Lakshmaiah University	Guntur	Andhra Pradesh
9	Sam Higginbottom Institute of Agricutlure, Technology & Sciences	Allahabad	Uttar Pradesh
10	Shanmugha Arts, Science, Technology & Research Academy	Thanjavur	Tamil Nadu

View More:

India’s Top 60 Private and Deemed Universities
Top 10 Universities with High-Quality Infrastructure
Top 10 Academically Recognised Universities
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

Skills Development at University Level

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July 10, 2013

Dr Haresh Tank,
Director, Station-e Language Lab

Every time university world rankings are announced, we harp on the way Indian universities lag behind in research and we have not been able to establish world class institutions. This clamour translates into a few articles on the renowned universities with higher rankings in the world order and that is all. We have yet to unearth the root cause of why Indian universities fare so badly in the university rankings. Universities are entirely different from the culture of rote learning and rat race for numbers that we celebrate at the school level. Last year,we fared equally badly in PISA rankings.It is this kind of schooling that does not develop the key competences and skills that leads the young generation of the country to institutions. While all this happens, nobody asks the key question that if students score so many marks in the university examinations and secure such wonderful grades, why are they considered unemployable by the World Bank and the market at large?

Our problem starts with the policy of higher education. It is sad to note that our policy begins and ends with increasing the GER. When GER increases, we feel we have triumphed. And what about the quality of higher education? There is a deep, meaningful silence over this at the policy level. In the era of internationalisation of education, our policy papers do not reflect any learning from the best practices of the world class institutions of the world. For instance, in China, all students whether science or arts have to compulsorily study and do well in English and Computers. They form integral part of their education because China knows that these are core skills in the 21st century. In India, even if English is offered, passing marks would do and hence, engineers and MBAs are speechless when facing an interview conducted in English.
At the level of policy, it is pertinent to note here that even countries like US and UK are also remodeling their education system because they have also lagged behind in the university rankings and they have been quick enough to respond to the fact that countries like Finland, South Korea and Germany have done remarkable work in terms of skilling their youth through higher education and this has led to the enhancement of students’ competencies and skills in a way that their students are readily employable and have the skills required for the real-life situations, unlike the rote learning we have cherished.

In the era of internationalisation of education, our policy papers do not reflect any learning from the best practices of the world-class institutions of the world

Skills Development Centre
With the concerns of Skills Development in view, Station-e envisaged the concept of Skills Development Centre (SDC). It is a unique construct, aiming at upskilling the youth of the country. We have established several SDCs at various educational institutions – college and university campuses across the country. SDC serves as the training wing of the university, operated in a digital learning lab and powered by highly sophisticated technology. SDC comes with in-built training programs on soft and life skills, integral to the theme of skills development and empowering the youth. Customised to the core, these modules have astonishing transformation value as they produce remarkable results in virtually no time. The youth across the country have benefitted from the innovative Skills Development Centres and have carved a niche for themselves in their chosen area of endeavour.

Manipal University Aiming to be a Frontrunner in Healthcare

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digitalLEARNING Network

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July 10, 2013

G K Prabhu,
Registrar, Manipal University

Manipal International University received the deemed university status in 1993. Over the years, it has spread its wings far and wide. Apart from three Indian campuses, it also boasts of international presence with a campus each in Dubai and Malaysia. G K Prabhu, Registrar, Manipal University, in conversation with Pragya Gupta.

How is the Manipal University aiming to enhance higher education in the country?
Manipal University today is well known for education and healthcare and we have about 24 institutions that are catering to various fields of study. Our vision is to be a global leader in human development, excellence in education and healthcare.

According to you, what are the major challenges being faced by private universities in India?
A private university does not get any kind of government grant and thus everything has to be taken care by the students’ fees. So the cost of education is passed on to the students, but we also know that with high cost, we are unable to attract the quality students. Thus, we have to strike a balance and we need to create scholarships through which we can attract quality students. Another challenge is the appointment of staff and faculty. Building quality physical infrastructure is easier, but what is more important is to attract quality faculty. There are some regulatory challenges as well. For example, we have to wait for a long period of time to get a nod for increasing the number of institutions or students. The authorities must not paint every deemed university with the same brush. They are right in their own way, but being one of the oldest private universities, I think we deserve some kind of flexibility in regulations.

[colored_box color=” yellow”]

“Building quality physical infrastructure is easier, but what is more important is to attract quality faculty” [/colored_box]

What kind of innovations have you introduced at Manipal University especially in the fields of medicine and management?
We have nearly 400 courses on offer, including engineering, dentistry, pharmacy, journalism, mass communication, hotel management, etc. From the last two to three years we have also introduced courses like humanities, European studies, and philosophy. This year we are celebrating the diamond jubilee of medical studies at our university and we have introduced integrated learning. For example, there are different courses like antatomy, physiology or pathology. Through the new teaching-learning concept if somebody talks about a particular organ then what the structure will be, what are the functions and if something goes wrong then what must be the pathology and what kind of medicine has to be given. So all those things will be taken care immediately at the same time. In management courses, we have a lot of industry interactions, as it makes the course very interesting as well as fruitful.

How is your University addressing employability concerns?
We have introduced a concept called the Practice School. Under this, in the last semester of engineering programme there are no course-works and students to go to the industry and do projects. We also invite many industry people to be part of our faculty and that has also helped in bringing the industry and academia together. We also have sabbatical under which some of our faculty members go to the industry, they work there for about two or three months, and get an exposure to the industry working. We also invite members from the industry in our board of studies.

Please share with us your international collaborations.
We have collaborations with nearly 100 foreign universities. These collaborations work at three levels. Firstly, the twinning programme, under which a few engineering students study at our campus for two years and towards the end of the second year all the credits that they earned are transferred for a partner university. The students continue studies for the next two years in the partner university either in the US or the UK, Australia, etc. In engineering it is called a 2+2 programme and students get a degree from the foreign at University. Secondly, we dual degree programme designed for the post graduation engineering courses. For one year students study here and second year at the partner university. At the end of the programme they receive separate degrees from both the universities. Thirdly, we have general student exchange programme in which students go for some courses at foreign universities and spend between two to six weeks. These are called elective courses. This works the other way round as well and we also receive many students from abroad who come here for a semester and then go back. This has been a very active programme at our University for last four to five years. Apart from this, we also have faculty exchange. The faculty from our and partner university jointly writes research proposals and seeks funding. For example in the European Union, there are a lot of research funds available for research collaborations between a European University and a non-European University

Top 10 Academically Recognised Universities

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digitalLEARNING Network

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July 10, 2013

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.

**Academic reputation(100)**
Parameter	Score
NAAC Rating	50
Recognition (AICTE,UGC, others)	20
Number of Departments & Courses	20
Number of Patents	10

Rank	Name of University	City	State
1	Birla Institute of Technology & Science	Pilani	Rajasthan
2	Lovely Professional University	Phagwara	Punjab
3	Amity University	Noida	Uttar Pradesh
4	VIT University	Vellore	Tamil Nadu
5	Birla Institute of Technology	Ranchi	Jharkhand
6	Bharati Vidyapeeth	Pune	Maharashtra
7	Manipal University	Manipal	Karnataka
8	Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan University	Bhubaneshwar	Odisha
9	University of Petroleum and Energy Studies	Dehradun	Uttarakhand
10	Jodhpur National University	Jodhpur	Rajasthan

View More:

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

Creating difference with digital classroom solutions

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July 10, 2013

Anil Goyal, Director, Mexus shares his experience on working with different schools across India. He further shares the innovative solution that schools can look forward to. Excerpts:

Please shed light on Mexus Classroom Solutions?
iKen Classrooms are designed with a consideration to leverage existing infrastructure and resources. Smart Classroom Infrastructure is compatible with all standard classroom aids viz writing boards, electricity arrangements, even seating arrangements and other installations.

Please shed light on new innovations on which institutions can bet on.
Orienting children to learn by observing and exploring rather than memorising right from the beginning of education process. To bring about a transition in learning, it is imperative that the mind-set of children is moulded into new thinking at an early stage. Brain-E-Kids, a unique pre-schooling format, encourages creativity, application and learning by involvement. Its ease-of-introduction as well as endto- end support by Mexus team makes it easier for institutions to adopt the concepts of iKen pedagogy right from the pre-schools.

Design Thinking is one of the organised approaches to learning that is being increasingly considered by schools. This learning process condisuretions minds to understand the concepts and apply it in the logical schema to real-life problem solving. The approach brings dynamism in thinking process by channeling minds in applying known information to new and unforeseen contexts. D&T Labs of Mexus Education supports schools in completely introducing ‘Design Thinking’ to Indian Schools.

What were the initial hiccups you faced while approaching these institutions?
Addressing developmental challenges in terms of R&D costs, building relevant platforms, also filing the content as per the board and publisher were the major concerns to tackle. Mexus Education has set up a specialised academic innovations team of 250 professionals across India to attend to school and region specific requirements.
Meeting with teachers’ increasingexpectation of total content dependencyMexus Education has chalked out a comprehensive training and hand-holding programme for teachers’, whereby the technology and its objectives are introduced to teachers.

What are the requirements of localised content?
Our content has already been customised to a few major regional languages and contexts and developing universal content that connects India as a whole has gone a long way in defining its acceptability of iKen Library.
We are helping teachers realise the right perspective of utilising several resources. Therefore, we organise a Training programme as a separate module that introduces teachers to classroom orientation and mixing the resources appropriately to best relate with the students.

Partnership is the Key to Capacity Building

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July 10, 2013

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.

Leaders Speak

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July 10, 2013

Luminaries from private and deemed universities present views on shaping up higher education in India, in conversation with Chhavi Bakaria

Rajendra Kumar Pandey,
President, NIIT University

Shaping Leaders for a Plural Society
We are different from the traditional industrial universities and our aim is to develop a leading centre of innovation and learning in emerging areas of knowledge society. In the 21st century, India has to create leaders who should be prepared to face new challenges because they have to operate in a multicultural environment. So apart from developing the key knowledge of the chosen field, it is important that we must develop in our students understanding of not only our culture but also their specific concerns. Students must also be able to operate in different environments, language ambiences and so on. Our university’s role is to create leaders who respond to different challenges.

Prof C Raj Kumar,
Vice Chancellor,O P Jindal UniversityEmpowering

Students through Flexible Courses
Our university has always focused on developing a truly interdisciplinary education. The creation of our five schools of law, international affairs, business, government and public policy, and liberal arts and humanities has been done in that regard. The previous tight-jacketed approach of the conventional education has lost its relevance. The focus on interdisciplinarity is well-established in top universities across the world. We stress a lot on interdisciplinary interactions so our students have had the opportunity of cross registering for courses across all schools and in our undergraduate and post graduate programmes. We also strive to provide maximum academic freedom to our faculty members in order for them to research and teach at the best of their abilities.

Dr A S Zadgaonkar,
Vice Chancellor, Dr CV Raman University

Aiming to Become a Centre for Innovation
We are a relatively young private University, yet in this short period we have managed to carve out a niche for ourselves in terms of courses offered, quality teaching and students, placements and above all, research. Our focus lies on innovation and research. Research with applicability in various areas is what we are working for. We hope to establish credentials as a research oriented center with pure, integrated as well as inter-disciplinary research. Technological innovations are also in the offing. Our M Phil and PhD cells boast of relevant research with practical applications in our day to day lives.

Prof Vijay Kant Verma,
Vice Chancellor, AISECT UniversityCreating Socially

Responsible Citizens
I believe higher education in India is in a transition phase and private universities have a very vital role to play in shaping it up. Our university has introduced minimum two skills in every course curriculum that can range from four wheeler repair to repair of mobile, etc. Also in addition to industrial experience, we encourage students to undertake social projects in the villages adopted by the University. The aim is to understand problems faced by the society and try to find a solution together. A social tracking system has been designed by a team of students to monitor and advise villagers on various health and social issues.

Synergising Current Teaching-learning Practices

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July 10, 2013

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.

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