What Literom can do ?

When it comes to implementation of IT, the Indian education community, specially the schools are seen maintaining a low profile. The reason behind this cold response towards technology is the mindset. Schools generally consider IT as a subject to be taught rather than a tool to be used. This article is an effort to change the conventional mindset of the Indian education community and bring forward the benefits of IT for efficient school administration and management.

Education system forms the backbone of every nation. The success of this system lies in correct knowledge dissemination process blended with smooth and efficient functioning of management system. If we give a closer look at the Indian education community specially the schools we will see how disorganized they are when it comes to administration and management. Technology can play a very crucial role in streamlining the whole system of education but schools tend to ignore this fact because of some myths or preconceived notion. According to school community technology is a subject to be taught rather than a tool to be used. They also fail to see the miracle due to the wrong vendor or product selection.

MAJOR REASONS FOR SCHOOLS TO REFREAIN FROM IT

• Schools are doing well without IT.
• It adds a lot of cost on school.
• We have tried many times but our users are not techno savvy.
• Not all our parents are IT enabled so what’s the point.
• Who will manage the data. 

 WHAT CAN  LITEROM DO FOR SCHOOLS / EDUCATION

 A properly planed and effective IT solutions  

IT can help you collect, store and share your data with a great ease and speed within your organization.  Manual efforts on the other hand can be very tedious, erroneous, non retrievable and costly. On one side where the management of the data for the current year is a typical task with manual working, a proper solution can make you access the data for even the past students. 

Manual work most of the time is Redundant,  Incomplete, Improper,  Not available when required.  Dependency factor is always high in this case.  Further handling old files is difficult and unhealthy.    Hand written data is sometime not readable.

The manual way of working gives us total freedom and flexibility …which results in a less protocol or standardized way of working.  An IT solution helps in proper documentation and stardardisation of education process by setting up protocols for each and every process of schooling.  We document and manage much more information than the manual process.   Accessing the documented information is again a very easy process. 

Advantages

•      Smooth handling of admission records and applications is possible with proper software which is a very big issue with manual process.

•      Fact based easy access to figures and data helps in making productive management decisions.

•      All the reports and communication with education boards (CBSE etc.) can be done fast and error free without much of time and dependency.   With manual work it is very much dependent process on the concerned person and care full handling is required.

•      With out a proper IT solution the interaction and information exchange with parents is a tedious and time consuming process.  We reduce the frequency to cope with it but with a proper solution schools can be very transparent and quick in communicating with parents as there is no extra hard work required.

•      Compilation of exam reports and analysis is almost in real time with IT wherein it use to block almost everything at the time of examinations as the entire education system use to get busy with calculations and report generation.

•      In  manual processing the exchange of information within various departments of the institution is very difficult and time consuming.  For example fine in library should be taken in fee section and the caution money in fee department should reflect in library.   

“We start if from admission of a student and track it upto the TC.  Everything in school from academic to extra curricular and even health records of the students are always a click away.    All this seems to be a normal process now which took significant efforts earlier I manual process”

Mrs.   Annama Abrahim
Principal, St. Annes Schools  

 Schools experience that the productivity of the same office staff increases after implementation of IT solutions.  They can work out things well in time and are free to take care of the other smaller issues in school management.   The same office work can be handled by less staff thereby allowing the rest of the man power to be deputed in other productive works.

•      In comparison to the manual fee collection less office staff can handle a big volume of fee collection.

•      The calculation and various reporting formats are generated in various sections.

•      The payroll processing at the end of month takes less time.

•      Stock management is more accurate and less time consuming.

•      Maximum time in manual processing is wasted in retrieving the earlier record and processing.  Whereas, the same time can now be utilized efficiently in further information collection. 

“Right from fee to admission details and other office works, we can now manage it efficiently with less staff which allows us to make better use of our man power resources in the school.  In fees days we use to get the reports at around 5 in evening now it is available within 5 min of the last collection time”

 Mrs.  Joseph John,
Manager, St. Annes Schools.

In a school since we manage information of thousands of users at a time against a number of transactions and activities, the paper usage in very high for collection, saving and distribution of such information.  Moreover the multiple copies of the data multiplies the usage.  An IT solution with a  good mechanism for the information processing and sharing saves a significant amount of paper for the school which in tern in not just cost effective but is eco friendly as well.

Although in present scenario it is hard to talk about paperless working but these kind of efforts take us very close to this position.

•      Many schools like St. Annes (Jodhpur ), DPS (Jodhpur) and Bhartiya Vidaya Bhavans, Jodhpur don’t use any attendance registers and similarly the marks collection and processing is also less paper oriented.  

•      Some of these schools are also practicing online exams to fine tune student skills without using paper based exams.  Although they continue with same examination for their general exam.

•      There is a great consumption of paper in regular circulars within the organization and also to the parents.  An IT base solution can not only make this process easy and fast but will save thousand and thousand of paper sheets for the school in the entire year.  Although we can continue to use papers for most important information like report cards.  Remember, a sheet with printing will not cost less than a rupee. 

•      There is a significant amount of reduction of paper usages in processing and maintaining examination records.  Starting from student list to final reports only the required print outs are taken precisely.

•      Till now the only way to circulate current news by the school is through printed news letters.  Every such periodical news circulation is late, time consuming and also utilizes lot of paper and manpower.  Schools like RIMC Dehradun, Welham Boys Dehradun, LKSEC Gotan etc, use their website and intranet enabled with dynamic news publishing system to circulate news in fastest and eco-friendly manner. 

 Communication and transparency always play a key role in forming a healthy relation ship with parents and also add to their satisfaction.   Properly working information system helps us making better use of parent teacher meetings as the crucial time of personal interaction is not consumed in just accessing the basic information and setting up the agenda.

Some schools are also using their web sites and portals to keep their parents informed about the latest in the school and facilitating their knowledge sharing with smartly designed tools.

•      Parents being busy these days can’t pay frequent visit to school but IT can help them be in touch with school for all they want and as frequent as they want from any where in this world.

•      Properly and timely informed parents can contribute better in the educational development of the child.

•      Schools can also keep parent informed about parenting problems and can guide them without putting much time and efforts.

•      Teachers can enhance their interaction with students by using concepts of schooling round the clock around the globe. 

•      Simple features like news letter broadcasting can keep parents informed about the hard work put in by the school for the overall  development of the child.

          Automation of basic procedures in school save a lot of man hrs which directly reflects to expenditure of the school.   FEE, Admission, Payroll,  stock

• FEE department was earlier managed by four people in St.  Annes Jodhpur and use to take the full day time to compile reports.  Now it is easily  managed by two and reports and generated almost in real time.  The spare man power is assisting the other schooling aspects.

• Library which was earlier managed with more than one Librarian and still had many short comings is now fully updated and equipped with information and is managed by just one librarian in many schools.  

    8. Automation of important units like fees, library and stock can effectively eliminate any ambiguity and loss of property and liquidity of the school.  We have come across various examples with schools where irregularity in fee collection resulted in serious money loss.  IT based solutions can improve this situation significantly.

•      Manual stock maintenance is very easy to be misused and is very difficult to supervise.  The computerized stock can save loss of valuable school assets and can also track consumption and help you make management decisions.

•      It was difficult to control various point of sales in schools like tuck shop and canteen but computerized system can help in controlling and channelising this aspect of schooling very well.   

•      Assuming that a printed communication with parents takes atleast Rs. 10 per copy, communication cost can be significantly reduced by gradually upgrading to electronic communication methods like e-mail, news letter broadcasting and SMS.

•      Schools invest a lot of  money in keeping track and communicating with their alumni.  With an efficient online solutions this is not just made more effective but reduces the cost involvement significantly.  

    11. There are many other important things that are only possible with  Information technology and not by normal or conventional methods.

 Schools like Subodh Public School Jaipur are using effective teacher appraisal system without much involvement of time and resources.  

    13. Connecting schools under a group :

IT based solutions can provide single point control and information access and better utalisation of resources at group level.  Group of Somerville schools in Delhi are experimenting one such attempt to connect all their schools from grass route level for all admin tasks from a single point.     The communication between the branches was very difficult, resource hungry and limited.  The new management system can also help them in making effective decisions.