I feel the only way we can make impact in education improvement is when we share good practices with peers in the community. Since many years, we at ITM Business School have taken lots of initiatives especially in relation to integrating information technology.
The base for its initiatives are because of its strong IT infrastructure. We have strong Wi-Fi connection all over the campus, through which every single student is connected to the global world. We are heavily dependent on open source software.
Our institution encourages open source on-line platform called Moodle stands for “Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment” and is a widely used learning management system adopted by our faculty members, staffs and students. It helps the faculty by offering many channels for differentiated learning activities. Our faculty members use Moodle to upload their ppts, case studies, case lets, documents, assignment instructions, provide links to other URLs, conduct on-line tests,chat sessions, group activities for internal assessments.
Moodle facilitates with two way communication where students can download the faculty notes and upload their assignments which can be evaluated by the faculty. Full fledged on-line tests can be conducted and the grades can be viewed by the students on the spot. The student performance can be recorded and downloaded as excel sheet for assessing internal marks.
Our Moodle server is a dedicated server which can be accessed anywhere, anytime in the world. The site address is : “ elearning.itmonline.co.in ”.Once the student joins ITM, he or she is given Moodle user name and password to access ITM’s Moodle server.
At present we make use of Moodle for class scheduling, for taking feedback from students & faculty members, to conduct on-line test and to upload course notes. In future, we are planing to use Moodle for maintaining students attendance, for generating the entire internal assessments, for conducting surveys and to declare examination results.
We also makes use of MOOCS – Massive Open On-line Course. It is an on-line course aimed at unlimited participation and open access through the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as videos, readings. MOOCS provide interactive user forums that help build a community for the students, professors, and teaching assistants. We encourage students and faculty members to register into MOOCS and get free on-line training on any courses available on MOOCS. Our faculty members and students are enrolled for short term courses like Teaching On-line: Reflections on Practice, Marketing Strategy and Data Mining from the providers like canvas network, Coursera and Udacity.
From last academic year, we conduct one full credit course through on-line using MOOCS and get certified from the registered universities. We take the advantage of global learning, the students will get the certificates from well known universities like Stanford, Harvard Business Schools., etc.
The growth of the technology has been responsible for transforming the education sector. Technological initiatives have helped make the education system convenient, not just for students but for education providers as well. On-line testing and education is one such technology that has been adopted by us. It creates a secure and accurate test platform, with faster result processing, which is advantageous for stake holders – institutions and students. E-learning is essentially the computer and network-enabled transfer of skills and knowledge. Since we have a good IT infrastructure, it can participate into any e-learning activities, our e-learning applications and processes include web-based learning, computer-based learning, virtual classroom opportunities and digital collaboration.
The very big advantage over e-learning platform is, it lets myriad forms of interactions among students and it lets institutions to communicate with their students better. We have got a dedicated team working on on-line courses like Macro Economics, Computer Information Systems, Financial Managements and Marketing Strategies. This team gives special training to ITM students in every area as per the students requirement.
Apart from this, our students developed a web site called “Campus on Net – ITM’s on-line Portal” as their capstone project. The objective of this site is to share their placement experiences. Many times placed students have to keep on repeating their interview experience to every student. Keeping this in mind our students had developed “Campus on net – ITM’s on-line portal” through which students share their experience with others who are yet to be placed. It is not only restricted to our students. Other college students also register and share their experience. Currently the site has got more than 150 students registered.
It also acts as ITM’s OLE, where in any member can buy or sell second hand products in a reasonable rate. It aims to develop different community, based on their interests and share their experiences. The students get to understand the placement process,interview questions, company-wise questions, boarding & lodging messages for their residential program.
Another great initiative by us is ITM Chronicle – an E-Magazine, introduced by IT students and overseen by the IT faculty, and a student driven program. It gives a complete update on all the current and future planned activities at ITM Kharghar campus. It covers all the areas like IT industry, economics, banks and marketing and activities like book reviews and management quizzes. Every term, 1 edition is being released with all the updates specific to the term.
I would love to hear from you and learn about your practices.
