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A team of experts has sent a proposal to NITI Aayog to digitally assess the quality of education provided at colleges and universities. The assessment proposal was submitted under the Atal Incubation Centre to replace the current manual assessment of education institutions with a digital e-assessment platform to analyze the quality of education provided in higher education institutes.
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Digital assessment expert, Prof. A Rajagopal said that the manual system has a lot of discrepancies that results in poor quality of the stakeholders’ experiences and the credibility of institutions is questioned. Another reason behind the poor assessment is the lack of technology support and deliverables that are required to analyze huge volume of data and information.
Various assessment agencies have their own standards and methodologies to rate different aspects of education. This creates a gap between the reports that are generated. Setting up a digital e-assessment of institutions will standardize the procedure for bodies such as NAAC and bridge the information gap between agencies across the world.
The proposal also aims to get rid of corrupt activities in the assessment process so that scalability can be guaranteed. Automated processes and online systems are also being proposed for education quality assessment so that the institutes and universities can be appropriately ranked by agencies like NAAC, NBA, etc.
The online system will have a pre-defined framework based on which the learning index, quality index knowledge index and assessment will be evaluated for every institution. To make the results more reliable, the online system will also provide an overall performance report of institutions that have been analyzed.
Experts are in the favor of digital assessment and have stated that it can be very helpful for institutions. Prof. Mariam Varghese, Former Vice Chancellor of SNDT Women’s University, is an expert in digital assessment and had developed a framework for this a decade ago. Varghese says that this system can be highly productive in the assessment of a huge number of institutions.
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Digital assessment model is not only faster but also helps in controlling corruption as everything is quantified. This also helps in maintaining transparency and regularity in the system.
The University Grants Commission has also stated that quality assessment must be done at regular intervals so that the standard of education can be improved. It is also mandatory for institutions to be graded by NAAC in order to be eligible for funds provided by UGC and getting the autonomous status.
