Edu-leaders

The needs of the education sector are now more complex than ever. Teachers and students are looking to extend the learning process much beyond the classroom. The need for timely information for decision making is becoming critical for administrators, who want to look beyond traditional spreadsheets to help them. Even from an infrastructure perspective, there is a demand to move beyond traditional labs and computer centres (“lab-in-a-bag”).

Born in Bangalore in the year 1999, IIIT-Bangalore has been a pioneer in the use of technology. Use of individual laptops, subscription to e-journals, net-based distribution of course materials, digital library, email as the primary form of internal communication and WiFi access (within Library) were some among them. Over the years, we have helped many sister institutes benefit from extensive IT usage and created an India-based International conference T4E (Technology in Education) that is in its fourth year. Here, we discuss three areas that IIIT -B is currently focussing on. These are the three key pillars that today’s academic infrastructure rests on.

Learning management systems (LMS) help transition education from a teachercentric- model to a student-centric-model. Teacher is no longer the preacher on a pedestal in the front, but a facilitator on the side. LMS provides online, anytimeany where access to course materials, discussion forums for intense interaction among students and faculty, online submissions of assignments, online distribution of grades, online examinations and many more features that transforms the entire learning process for the students. We used a simple HTML-based “course pages” in the early years, moved on to simple LMS systems and in the past five  years zeroed on to a widely used opensource LMS tool “Moodle”. Practically all the courses use “Moodle” to derive all the benefits of LMS and it has become the nerve centre of course activities.

Academic ERP systems are becoming indispensible to academic infrastructure because of large sizes, diverse programmes and tough compliance requirements. These systems are tuned to the needs of educational institutions. They include modules for managing student lifecycle, outreach (placement, alumni, etc.,) and infrastructure (hostels, classrooms, etc.,). Specifically tuned HR and Finance modules are also included. IIITBangalore has started using a custom-built ERP in the past three years to address student/ course management, course registration, add/drop of courses, personal information management, hostel allotment, fee collection, project groups management, examination scheduling, classroom scheduling, special talks, event management, outreach management, placement and alumni engagement.

Cloud services for academia is an emerging trend that is yet to mature. Institutions are moving towards cloud services as they find it increasingly difficult to manage their IT. Sevices like email and website management are moving to the cloud. With every student now carrying a laptop, traditional computer centers are also getting replaced and complete labs are being run in the cloud. Cloud computing enables expensive resources like high-end servers, expensive equipment and other resources to be shared in a manner that provides enhanced standardisation, flexibility, scalability and reliability of the services that are unmatched by traditional computer centres.

At IIIT-Bangalore, student email services were moved to the cloud four years back. At that time cloud computing was new, and we are perhaps one of the first institutions to bet on the cloud. It was done in a manner that most users would not even know that their email accounts have moved to the cloud (by carefully mapping the domain names that were still IIIT-Bangalore specific). Attempts are on to leverage the global experiences of Net-based Labs (iLab of MIT, for example). Owing to the positive experience, we are now moving other critical services to the cloud. It will be interesting to grow into a situation where an IT institute has no IT infrastructure inside the institute for today’s needs (though there will be  local resources for tomorrow’s needs!)

Our journey in leveraging IT for academic infrastructure to address all the “Four L’s of Learning” (Lectures, Library, Labs and Life) has been rewarding. It had its due challenges, but being an IT institute, enough expertise was always available locally to overcome those challenges.