International Journal of Information Technology & Computer Science ( IJITCS ) (ISSN No : 2091-1610 ) Volume 6 : Issue on November / December , 2012

Institutional preparedness for e-governance in Indian Affiliating Universities A Study on Teaching Faculties perspective
A Balasubramanian Department of Communication Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham Coimbatore, India a_balasubramanian@cb.amrita.edu

P Govindaraju Department of Communication Manonmaniam Sundaranar University Tirunelveli, India p_govindaraju@yahoo.com ABSTRACT The application of technology world over has brought radical changes in the traditional view on career option and security. Within the context of rapid technological change and shift in market conditions, the Indian education system is challenged with the problem of expanding its educational opportunities. The concept of governance applied to universities in India is related to the exercise of controlling the power of different centers and departments which are part of an Indian affiliating university. This research paper aims to understand the institutional preparedness for e-governance in Indian Affiliating Universities from the perspective of teaching faculty. The data is collected through questionnaire and analyzed using factor analysis. Keywords : ICT, E-Governance, E-Governance in Indian Affiliating University, Factor Analysis I. Introduction Providing quality education is the foundation for the development of society and it plays a vital role in the establishment of economy, social prosperity and political stability. Further, it integrates people into society and teaches them values and morals. It constitutes the core of human resource development. A compelling need of innovative methods for technical and non-technical workers has been brought about by revolutionary changes in the field of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and the workers have to equip themselves according to the requirements of the workplace. The application of technology world over has brought radical changes in the traditional view on career option and security. Within the context of rapid technological change and shift in market conditions, the Indian education system is challenged with the problem of providing quality higher education to its huge population, with substantial increase in the budget. New millennium experiences the phenomena of liberalization, privatization, globalization and easy access expediting the emergence of Virtual Universities. The emergence of Virtual University enables the learners to study at work and at home. The learners in the information age can determine their own pace of study and gain quality control values, both to them and to their organizations.

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International Journal of Information Technology & Computer Science ( IJITCS ) (ISSN No : 2091-1610 ) Volume 6 : Issue on November / December , 2012

The vision of the Government of India is to attain the status of a developed nation by 2020. The application of ICT in higher education can prove effective to achieve India the status of developed nation (Romesh Verma, 2005). The main objective of this study is to identify the potential areas in affiliating Indian university administration where e-governance can be implemented. II. Affiliating Indian Universities A Profile Affiliating system is still followed in almost all the Government funded universities in India. The governance structure of academic institutions has not changed much from what it has inherited from the British. There are five types of universities in India, namely, Central Universities, State Universities, Deemed Universities, Institutes of National Importance and Institutes established by the state legislation. Almost all the state universities are affiliating universities and carry the burden of the academic administration of the affiliated colleges ranging from 200 to 400. To get an idea of the dimension of the task that is being carried out by a typical affiliating university, Kulandaisamy (2006) gives the following statistical data. The University of Madras with 174 affiliated colleges during the year 2004-2005, has set 1740 different question papers, valued 18,82,680 answer books, processed the marks and published the results. Thus the affiliating universities in India mainly function as dignified examination boards and lot of clerical and paper work is involved in the day-to-day university administration. Hence the clerical work involved in administration of an affiliating Indian university is enormous and large number of clerical staff is required for this purpose. Sometimes, they even go for appointment of additional staff members on daily wage basis. There are inherent delays, lapses, and inefficiency in administration leading to various problems and issues. Hence e-governance will go a long way in improving the overall functioning of affiliating Indian Universities. This paper investigates the problem of introducing e-governance form the perspective of teaching faculty of Indian affiliating universities. III. E-Governance in Indian University Administration The concept of governance applied to an university is related to the exercise of controlling the power of different centers and departments which are part of the university. This kind of exercise is based on the drawing of an adequate system which executes different levels of institutional and relational power. These are integrated in a model of electronic governance (e-governance), which is structured in different Internal Information Systems (IIS). Those systems make use of data warehouses that consist of information that is extracted from the users profile. The full operation of these new digital e-governance platforms implies the integration of e-business models into the institutional, organizational and relational networks of the universities. Universities and colleges routinely use ICT and e-governance for many administrative and support tasks, such as payroll and marketing, and specialist activities such as scientific research (Peter James & Lisa Hopkinson (2009). Until recently, this was less true of its use in their core activity of teaching and learning (Collis, 2002; Oliver, 2005). This Paper is presented on : International Conference on Information Technology, E-Government and applications ( ICITEA 2012) Page 43

International Journal of Information Technology & Computer Science ( IJITCS ) (ISSN No : 2091-1610 ) Volume 6 : Issue on November / December , 2012

A survey report stated that there would be great use of ICT application over the next 3-5 years, and 30% of the respondents thought that it would rise a great deal (James and Hopkinson, 2008d). The individual elements of the ICT activities of an University or College form part of an enterprise architecture (Anderson and Backhouse, 2008; American National Standards Institute/Institute of Electrical Electronics Engineers, 2008). This has four dimensions: Business, Applications, Information and Technology. In the present dynamic sector, it is very important for educational institutions to have an optimum use of resources which enable them to create healthy student and management friendly environment which collectively provide quality education that satisfy growing expectations of students. Shreenidhi Libibfotech has offered software solutions called University Management System (UMS) for different types of educational institutes which helps them in day-to-day operations by automation of different academic, administrative and other supportive activities. UMS is a complete Decision Support System having various modules which enable education institutions to implement E-Governance in an effective and efficient way1. IntelliEXAMS the software suite of Mindlogicx2 has been designed to manage the examination process of Anna University in Tamil Nadu, India by diligently handling the complete life cycle of their high stake examinations starting from online registration of candidates, online scheduling of examinations, examination fee management, internal mark uploading, online hall ticket generation, distributed authoring of question papers, secured question paper delivery, multiple digital evaluation, tracking of students performance & performance analysis to publishing of results and printing of mark sheets and certificates. The work flow system integrated in this software provides instant access to the university authorities for effectively managing the whole process in a scientific manner. intelliEXAMS framework built as a technology suite, provides solution to universities / institutions as Managed Application Service (MAS). It is a web based authoring tool that offers convenience & alacrity and at the same time its hardware based authentication ensures the whole process is highly secure. IV. Methodology Implementation of e-governance in the administration of an affiliating Indian university is really a complex issue. The various state holders involved are students of the various departments of the university, research scholars, teaching faculty, administrative staff, students in distance education wing and the general public. The expectations of each of the above category are different. In this paper the issues involved in implementation of e-governance from the perspective of the teaching faculty of the university departments are investigated. The major responsibilities of the teaching faculty are teaching, evaluation, admission of students to the courses offered by the departments, involved in university administration and maintenance of student records. Based on these aspects a questionnaire consisting thirty three questions was prepared and descriptive survey method was used to collect the necessary data.

1 http://www.libinfotech.com/UniversityManagementSystem.pdf 2 http://www.mindlogicx.com/intelliEXAMS.html

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International Journal of Information Technology & Computer Science ( IJITCS ) (ISSN No : 2091-1610 ) Volume 6 : Issue on November / December , 2012

Collection of data from all Indian affiliating universities is practically impossible because they are scattered in twenty nine states in India. Hence, in addition to data collection by visiting universities in the following states Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka, it was decided to use email and regular postal correspondence for data collection from most of the Universities all over the country. Questionnaires were sent to 245 universities and the filled-in questionnaires were received from 162 universities including one medical university, two technical universities, ten central universities and one hundred and forty nine state universities and the sample size is 448. The collected data was analyzed using SPSS V16 and factor analysis was used for interpretation. V. Analysis and Interpretation The researcher has conducted Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) Measure and Bartletts test and results are shown in Table 1.

Table 1

Based on the output, namely, the KMO = 0.822, it is observed that the degree of common variance among the variables is quite high and therefore factor analysis can be conducted. The use of factor analysis on the data has uncovered the following five factors: (i) Creation of Database for teaching staff in the university department, (ii) Online maintenance of students record, (iii) Online facility for staff members, (iv) Examination related activities and (v) Administration related activities. The first underlying factor holes with largest contribution of 39.708% of total variance. The second underlying factor holds 14.525% of total variance. The underlying third factor holds 7.901% of total variance. The underlying fourth factor holds 4.499% of total variance, whereas the underlying fifth factor holds 4.155% of total variance. Thus the five factors together hold 70.788% of variations and the total thirty three items were reduced into five factors. Factor I, the most important component, named as database creation, is the combination of six variables. Factor II, named as online maintenance of students record, consisting of eight variables was given second most importance. Factor III, the third most important component, named as online facility for staff members, has the combination of nine variables. Factor IV named as, examination related activities, consisting of five variables was given fourth importance and the factor V, administration related activities, a combination of five variables was the last important factor.

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International Journal of Information Technology & Computer Science ( IJITCS ) (ISSN No : 2091-1610 ) Volume 6 : Issue on November / December , 2012

VI. Conclusion From the statistical analysis of the questionnaire administered to the teaching staff of various Indian universities the following inferences and conclusions are arrived at. The teaching staffs in the university departments consider inclusion of the details about the departments, their personal curriculum vitae and other particulars as most important, since this information plays a vital role in attracting students to their departments. The faculty members have to spend substantial amount of time in maintaining students record such as their internal marks and attendance details. Also, they spend much time in preparing the course material, examination question papers, assignments and evaluation of answer sheets and assignments. Hence, online facility for posting the course materials, classroom notes, assignment topics and facility for conducting online test will substantially reduce the time they have to spend on such works. Thus they consider online maintenance of student records as the second most important factor. Most of the online facilitates which are proposed under factor III are not considered to be very significant by the teaching faculty, since such activates are not very frequent and they are not facing any difficulty as such in carrying out these activities. Since not all the faculty members are directly involved in the examination and administration related activities, factors IV and V are considered to be least significant by the teaching staff in the university departments. From the statistical analysis carried out on the data collected by the researcher, it is seen that teaching staff members are in favor of implementing e-governance in university administration. Influence of teaching staff towards institutional preparedness is relatively high. VII. References 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Alexander T. Basilevsky (1994). Statistical Factor Analysis and Related Methods Theory and Applications, Wiley-Blackwell. Anderson, P. & Backhouse, G., 2008. Enterprise Architecture, An Introduction. JISC Briefing Paper, www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/bpenterprisearchitecturev1.pdf Carmines, E. G. & Zeller, R. A. (1990). Reliability and Validity Assessment. Sage University Paper. Collis, B., 2002. Information technologies for education and training. In: Adelsberger, H., Collis, B. & Pawlowski, J. (eds) Handbook on Technologies for Information and Training. Berlin: Springer Verlag. Edward E. Cureton; Ralph B. DAgostino (1993). Factor Analysis, Taylor and Francis. James, P. & Hopkinson, L., 2008d. Results of the 2008 SusteIT Survey. A Best Practice Review prepared for the Joint Information Services Committee (JISC).: www.susteit.org.uk V C Kulandisamy (2006), Reconstruction of Higher Education in India, The ICFAI University Press. Maddi Gurumurty Reddy (1997). Higher Education in India, APH Publishing. Moonis Raza (1991). Higher Education in India: Retrospect and Prospect, Association of Indian Universities. 10. Oliver, R., 2005. Ten more years of educational technologies in education: How far have we travelled? Australian Educational Computing, 20(1): 1823. 11. Peter James & Lisa Hopkinson (2009), Sustainable ICT in Further and Higher Education: A Report for the Joint Information Services Committee. 12. Romesh Verma, (2005), Distance Education in Technological Age, Anmol.

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