Over the last decade, India has transformed into an information-intensive and information-sensitive society. The pandemic has given a further push to technology in most sectors, including education, especially for teaching and learning. However, tech-enabled governance and management in higher education are relatively novel, requiring an in-depth and comprehensive analysis.
The Unified University and College Management System (UUCMS) is a flagship project of the Department of Higher Education, Government of Karnataka. It aims to bring greater transparency, efficiency, and accountability among universities and colleges in Karnataka. The structure of the UUCMS is similar to the SAMARTH university e-governance portal offered to public universities and select higher education institutions in New Delhi.
While UUCMS helps, the overall user experience across HEIs in Karnataka is fraught with challenges that need to be addressed.
State-run public universities and colleges account for 70 per cent of students in the state. The UUCMS has reduced the unnecessary use of human, physical, and fiscal resources. Further, it provides a ‘unified’ system to link students’ Aadhaar data.
However, the challenges is in the validation of Aadhaar, and variations in names of the students between Aadhaar and the SSLC transcript; as an immediate solution, UUCMS has enabled editing student names by the registrar of the university, which is not a sustainable solution. Despite this, name variation issue remains unresolved, creating commotion among faculty members, administrators, and students. There are more challenges.
The academic council of univeristies approve a list of eligible pre-university or school board(s) in the UUCMS. However, a non-eligible board cannot be deleted from the meta-list, inconveniencing students and administrators.
The UUCMS’s academic module is intended to have a robust course and credit management system.
The module, however, is not resilient to changes: it does not allow universities to correct errors after validating the curriculum. UUCMS alone can rectify errors, exposing universities to unwarranted hierarchies, dependencies and delays.
The current examination module of UUCMS is partially digitised. The answer scripts are manually corrected, and the evaluated marks are entered into the portal. Lack of skilled human resources to handle this process is a challenge that university examination sections face. Even before the implementation of UUCMS, many state public universities had a fully digital evaluation process, including features such as online delivery of question papers, online evaluation of answer scripts, and digital photocopies of the answer scripts, which were efficient. To make the UUCMS a transparent, efficient, and accountable information system, the following must be accommodated:
1. a provision to auto-populate the data once a fortnight from the UIDAI, enabling uniformity among prospective students.
2. giving universities the option to make a tailored list of PU/school boards for admission as approved by the university’s statutory bodies
3. provide full autonomy to universities to make changes after the validation of the curriculum
4. provide a user-friendly interface so that the existing public state universities/ college staff can seamlessly engage with the system.
5. recruit dedicated staff for the UUCMS since faculty members cannot dedicate time and effort to the UUCMS.
6. introduce more modules such as HR, affiliation, student support, and asset and library management.
7. knowledge transfer between the UUCMS core team and the stakeholders in HEI.
The government must make sure that the UUCMS is not just a portal with an agency. It should be an essential and integrated component of the university, a system seamlessly integrated into the institution.
(Singai works at Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences, Bengaluru, and Kumaraswamy is an independent researcher)