How does Linways Academic Management System higher educational institutions improves quality in education and reduce teacher’s workload

A features blog on Linways AMS about simplifying daily tasks and streamlining workflows.

In the previous blog, we discussed about a detailed checklist or choosing the right edtech platform for managing your institution. And we also mentioned that in this blog, we will look into each of those awesome features of Linways AMS, their relevance, importance and how Linways AMS helps higher educational institutions to simplify and automate their academics in the next blog. So without further ado, let’s get straight into it.

Linways AMS is a cloud-based academic management platform that helps teachers to streamline and simplify their daily academic activities. Linways is specifically designed with ease of use in mind. We’ve gone to great lengths to make sure that Linways AMS is easy to use, offers maximum functionality, and provide the best experience to its users while trying to improve their education’s quality.

Here are some of the major features of Linways Academic Management System which we are going to discuss in this blog.

• Admissions
• Course planner
• OBE
• University reports
• Course material distribution
• Attendance marking
• NBA and NAAC reports

We will check out each of these one by one.

Admissions

Linways AMS has a great admission module. Usually, admissions are this messy, time-consuming, and highly laborious tasks that takes weeks, if not months, to be fully complete. Institutions has to invite applications, make sure that the students would register, manage payments, shortlist eligible students, then collect their details, and finally create and allot batches to them, all before the classes begin. Usually this takes a team of faculty and managerial staff working day and night to make sure that everything goes smoothly. Still there are many instances where they somehow mess up. It may not be intentional, but we are after all, only human.

To help academic institutions to simplify this admission process, Linways has a full-fledged admission module that let’s students apply online, register online, and make payments online. This takes a huge load off the staff’s shoulders that they don’t have to manually do everything. Creating and fixing the norms and forms once does it. Once the students have applied, the system will also shortlist them for the college based on previously set cutoff marks and rules.

Since Linways is primarily an Academic Management System, we always try to make sure that the core academics is never unnecessarily affected with the administration tasks. So to improve the overall quality, we’ve made the admission process smoother for your institution. Your staff can also split the eligible applicants into batches from the system and allot them classes from the system.

Course planner

Course planner is one of the core academic functions in our AMS. It enables the faculty to create plans for the entire semester/year and help them follow that course plan as the course progresses with actual plan. The course planner is also an important element for university reports, accreditation reports etc.

Here’s how it works. The faculty creates course plan, which include the modules, chapters, course delivery method, and the dates. It’s basically a calendar which says on this particular day, I’m going to take this chapter using this course delivery method. This is called a proposed plan. So when you look at the proposed plan, you get an overview about which areas of topics you are going to cover on a specific day. This helps the students to plan ahead and keep track of their curriculum.

The next step includes actual plan. This is a daily worklog about the course which the teacher updates. This will have the course details based on the proposed plan, and if the teacher completed the topics on a particular day as they’ve mentioned in the proposed plan, they mark complete in the actual plan. It they, for any reason, couldn’t, they mark incomplete, and they can simply extend that topic to another day. This helps the teacher to track the course, and see whether they are on schedule for the semester/year.

OBE

The Outcome Based Education is a learning theory that focuses on the outcomes or goals instead of results. The educators set a certain number of necessary skills and knowledge that the learner should possess at the end of education and they are identified as the outcomes. The assessments like exams, assignments, and projects are then defined to measure the achievement of these outcomes, and their results indicate whether the students has achieved them or not. Frameworks for accreditation like the NBA and NAAC bases their assessment on the OBE theory. We have done quite some research on this and have taken excessive critical feedback from many teachers just to make sure that Linways AMS has a usable and highly functional OBE module.

Our OBE module include

• options to create outcomes both program outcomes and course outcomes by higher authorities,
• detailed outcome attainment tracker to decide and fix contributions from different course outcomes to their program outcomes,
• a question paper creator to help faculty to map assessments to outcomes at the time of creating questions,
• and a full-fledged analytics for deep insights and specific attainment matrices.

Since OBE is a globally accepted learning paradigm, there is a high regard for it in the education community. But many are still cautious about implementing it because they think it’s complex and difficult to implement in an adaptive way. However, since we have done extensive research on the topic, our OBE management module for academic institutions is concise, easy for teachers to adapt to, and offers better insights into the whole attainment and tracking of outcomes. This also comes in handy when institutions are going for accreditation because they mandate OBE workflow as a quality benchmark. So institutions can easily adapt Linways AMS with it’s in-built, easy-t-use OBE module and make the whole process smoother.

University reports

University reports is also a huge requirement for colleges. They are meticulous, detailed, and recurring. This make most university reports a difficult burden for most institutions. Also, they take up valuable time of the teachers which is better spent on teaching and quality improvement. But that’s not how our system works. Every few months, the teachers have to collect and organise information from different batches, create performance reports, analyse assessment data, compile that wealth of information into pre designed formats, and send them over to the university.

We have options to simply upload those report formats in to the AMS and since all the data are already available in the system, the teachers can easily create the university report with just a few clicks. This saves countless hours every few months for most of the faculty in a college. For the institution, this is a great way to save lots of time and money, while improving their staff’s efficiency and satisfaction.

Course material distribution

Course material distribution is quite simple, and yet very powerful when it comes to academic quality improvement. It amounts to blended learning, a highly popular learning mechanism, and yet is so easy to adapt for our faculty. Students will not have to spend hours on finding and copying the correct course material if the teacher could simply share it to them through the academic management platform. The blended learning is essentially using both technology and offline teacher driven classroom interactions to complete the learning. Since the course materials are distributed through the system, students can easily revisit what they’ve learned from the classroom anytime, and can look up in advance on what they are going to learn in class.

Attendance marking

Attendance marking is such a basic part of our academic environment, and yet many overlook it as fairly easy and unimportant. However, there are meticulous and hard work that goes into creating an easy-to-use, and fully functional attendance module like that of Linways. Linways offers roll no. method, checklist system, and timetable method for marking the attendance in Linways AMS.

• The roll number method essentially means listing the roll numbers of the students who are absent.
• In the mark list/checklist method, the faculty can manually mark the students who are absent from the list of the whole batch.
• The timetable method is

Now for the reports, Linways AMS also provides insightful analytics reports for the decision makers to have a detailed analysis of the student performances. Linways AMS has batch-wise, hour-wise, and subject-wise reports available to this end.

NBA and NAAC reports

The National Board of Accreditation (NBA) and the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) are autonomous bodies working inside the Indian higher educational domain to assess and assure the quality of higher educational institutions and programs.

Though they use OBE to assure quality and prescribe quality benchmarks, their workflows can be difficult to keep track of on a daily basis. However, after extensive research and continuous user feedback, we have perfected the accreditation modules for both the NBA and NAAC that helps institutions to simplify and streamline their accreditation workflow. Besides outcome management and attainment reports, our AMS also lets institutions to create committees, collect student and faculty feedback, track student and faculty performance reports, manage grievances, and much more.

Again, as we mentioned earlier, the NBA and NAAC uses OBE for their assessment, you can see the earlier section about OBE on how Linways AMS addresses it into the academic workflow.

We will discuss the following in our next blog that will come out next week, Weak student identification

• Push notifications
• Analytics module for principal insights
• Examinations and result publication
• Teacher appraisals and performance analysis
• Feedback and grievance management

The next blog will be the last part of this series about Linways AMS and it’s features for higher educational institution.

Originally published at Linways Technologies.