Technology has always offered to make our lives simple and effective but we complicate it by not putting efforts to understand any technology resulting in chaos and erroneous work. Although technology is finally being incorporated into education, its usage for teaching and learning methods is still a challenge. All the educational institutes are trying their best to have ready access to technology, trained teachers and an effective learning environment but the results are not that satisfactory. So, it can be said that developments are taking place everywhere and the rising complexity of our educational system has made educational planning a necessity. The country is facing problems like population explosion, manpower requirements, inequality between demands of the economy and educational products, scarcity of resources and chaotic applications of systematic developments. Our education system is facing all these challenges and that’s why a proper planning of the teaching & learning structure has become mandatory. It can also be considered as the “Institutional Planning” which means that the plans are initiated, formulated and executed in order to achieve the set targets. The major challenges faced by the educational institutes in designing the action plans are:
-> To make every program a grand success.
-> To save time and unnecessary wastage of money.
-> To solve educational problems by avoiding trial and error.
-> To utilize the available resources.
-> To contribute to the smoothness, ease and efficiency of the administrative process.
-> To create the best means by which society will preserve and develop its future value system, knowledge, skills and application of learning in real life.
-> To make education necessary for every individual so that they can make their educational journey goal-oriented and purposeful.
So, taking above mentioned points into consideration, we can categorize educational planning as follows:
-> Administrative Planning: Proper distribution of responsibilities and powers for different levels of education like primary, secondary, technical and professional. This planning helps in deciding the duration of an educational programme, financial allocation or budget required by the programme, engagement of educational officials and management procedures to run the selected programmes etc.
-> Academic or Curricular Planning: This refers to planning for flawless academic designing of syllabus for any programme and proper structure of the Course keeping all the points formulation of educational goals, formation of curriculum committee for development of curriculum and selection of appropriate strategies and methods of teaching, planning of content units, planning for evaluation, planning for review of the curriculum, planning for use of library, planning for special provision for the gifted and remedial instruction for slow learners etc.
-> Co-Curricular Planning: This planning is important for overall development of the student with the help of student welfare services, planning for sports and games, planning for social activities and programmes, planning for cultural activities and programmes, planning for hobbies etc.
-> Instructional Planning: This planning takes place at macro-level as it deals with planning in classroom situations to balance its emotional and organisational climate. It encompasses specific objectives, apt means for creating learning activities, presenting effective learning experiences, monitoring learning or instructional progress, selection of supervised evaluation techniques to achieve the learning outcomes etc.
At this sensitive and crucial stage, iCloudEMS, as the digital leader which has brought digital transformation in the educational organizations with the help of its cloud based unified Education Management System, offers its managed services to the institutes’ ERP along with its flagship products to provide a right direction to all the action plans for the accomplishment of desired goals like:
-> Offering widespread availability of student databases that can help to track individual’s progress and encourage teachers to identify learning objectives and differentiate instruction based on the needs of their students.
-> Providing a comfortable teaching environment for the teachers who require to present any instruction using technology. They can easily acquaint themselves with the channel which is relevant to the course objectives, the learning style, mode and the technology selected.
-> Strengthening the evaluating technology which is required for appropriate evaluation including the methods of instructions, grading system, assessment reports and performance reports.
-> Helping the teachers to design follow-up activities by using technology in order to evaluate students’ learning and understanding.
-> Simplifying and bringing clarity by segregating the Program Outcome (PO), Course Outcome (CO), Program Specific Outcome (PSO) and Program Educational Objective (PEO) digitally to assure the attainment of all the learning objectives & outcomes.
-> Enabling the stakeholders to handle the operations related to Online Live Classes and Examination with Live Proctoring effortlessly, maintaining the credibility of the system at the priority.
The implementation of outcomes-based education and reporting systems in educational programs has been accompanied by a range of technical problems, including tensions between the summative and formative purposes of assessment and doubts surrounding the validity and reliability of teacher constructed assessment tasks. In addition to that, preparing an effective Course File or Course Structure is one of the challenges as well which has brought all the institutes on their toes as NBA has laid down the guidelines for each program through the means of rubrics to undergo an evaluation process which implies the accreditation grade to be given from NBA committee and formulation of a proper Course structure is mandatory for that. But how can iCloudEMS contribute to this action plan? We’ll find out in the next blog!!!