Education in India

An Education BPO model

I recently came across Meta-i Technologies, a start-up company incubated by IIM Bangalore, that has set itself up as an education BPO.  The home page on their web site seems to be a dead end (as of today) and I'm not sure if the company is still active. But their education BPO model is an interesting one in the context of my earlier post on leasing educational infrastructure. According to Meta-i's web site,

META-i TECHNOLOGIES is a Business Process Outsourcing, Educational Support Services Company professionally managed and incubated at the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore (IIM-B), providing for strategic, long term and value-added back office support as well as process and technology services to your school, college or University.

Under our BPO services, we provide for long term, strategic process, workflow and technology outsourcing options, so that you could focus on what your institution was founded for.

"Providing value education", without having to worry too much into daily operational details. Every single process adopted by META-i at your institute can be validated by you, and our service and quality levels are defined together with you. So you can be rest assured that processes are being undertaken exactly the way you like them to be, even when you are on your vacation! Meta-i shares with you the best practices followed elsewhere by other institutions that may help you to undertake some of your processes in a much more efficient manner.

So what do they actually do? (I wonder why company web sites tend to use jargon and verbose ununderstandable language to explain what they do). An article in the Times of India  (March 03, 2003) explains.

Kumaran School, IIM Bangalore, Institute of Biotechnology and Applied Bioinformatics (IBAB) and Institute of Business Management & Technology (IBM&T) are outsourcing non-core operations like selection, admission and placement of students to third-party companies.

The institutes normally farm out the work in the form of projects and pay for each on its completion. Besides ensuring faster delivery, outsourcing is 15 percent cheaper than in-house work. Kumaran School, with a studentstrength of 1,200, is collaborating with Meta-i Technologies, a BPO outfit spawned by IIM, Bangalore, for deploying a school management system.

It has captured historical data of the school (data relating to student almuni and their parents, selection and admission details), besides updating information on a regular basis.

Says Deepa Sridhar, Director of Kumaran School: "The BPO provider is managing the system by putting a help desk in place and it gives rolebased access to students, parents, administrative staff and teachers."

Centre for Public Policy at IIMB, which imparts policy-related training to mid-level IAS officers, has engaged Meta-i to build a Web information system that updates data five times a day in addition to replying to queries from the candidates.

Says Prof. Nagadevra, faculty member at CPP, "With third party service provider in place,we can focus on core job of providing quality education and research, while other activities such as handling trainees’ queries get outsourced."

According to Mani Kamatchi, MD of Meta-i: "Treating students, parents and teachers as customers has become crucial for educational institutes for which they are increasingly outsourcing this activity to BPO companies."

BPO opportunity in the educational sector is huge, with around 237 state-recognised universities, 46 deemed universities, 11,100 aided colleges and 10,000 autonomous colleges.

If you tot up the number of educational institutions around the world, the education BPO opportunity that Meta-i is talking abut is indeed a sizeable one.

According to another page on Meta-i's website,

www.easyadmissions.com is India's first online college application platform, which is designed to provide a simple web based information support systems to academic institutions, enabling students to apply to hundreds of colleges online. Easyadmissions.com allows students to have a single point of access to information regarding institutions and their offerings, facilitating students to access information and facilitating online application systems. The system also caters to the varied administrative needs of principals and admissions-counsellors of colleges across India, enabling them to effectively manage their application process.

but the easyadmissions.com website doesn't work currently. So I'm not sure if Meta-i is still an active company, given that the home page of their web site doesn't lead anywhere either.

Pacsoft, a Bangalore-based company has taken another approach to helping schools manage their administration - they've developed Lyceum, an educational ERP package for schools. Express Computer  (December 27, 2004) has more about Lyceum.

Pac Soft Solutions (Pacsoft) is on a drive to popularise its flagship educational ERP product, Lyceum, with Indian schools and colleges. The company has already signed up 850 educational institutions, including the   likes of Bishop Cotton School for Boys (Bangalore), Frank Anthony Public School (Kolkata and Bangalore), Pathways School (Delhi) and the SS Singhania School   (Mumbai). It now plans to target 10,000 educational institutions across the country over the next three years with Lyceum.

Lyceum is a connected learning solution that lets Indian educational institutions offer anytime, anyplace access to students, educators and parents. The per user licence cost ranges from Rs 25,000 to Rs 8 lakh. Lyceum gives a platform to students and teachers to interact with each other. Parents are able to log in and check on their child’s performance, marks, fees, attendance and lessons completed for the day. They can have a virtual Parents Teachers Association meeting almost on a daily basis.  The software also automates essential but time-consuming administrative tasks. The various modules of Lyceum include fee management, payroll management, attendance management, and marks and student monitoring. The integration of devices such as smart cards and handheld devices ensures that Lyceum  eliminates most of the administrative headaches of school managements. Lyceum’s remote management capability helps educational authorities track the real-time progress of their institutions on multiple fronts. The e-governance module helps promote a seamless and transparent administrative environment for the educational sector.

The average deal size for an educational ERP deployment is roughly Rs 3.5 lakh. Ever since Pacsoft first shipped Lyceum in 1991, it has become a buzzword among tech-savvy educational institutions. The Lyceum product family has three derivatives: the school ERP system, mylyceum.net (which is the connected learning module), and the e-governance module (targeted at education boards and education departments in the government ). mylyceum.net is an online portal that has information pertaining to a student and his or her academic growth curve. An institution has to subscribe to the portal that is hosted at Pacsoft’s site in Bangalore. The e-governance module helps education boards and government departments to share information.

However, selling ERP to schools has not been easy. As Sait explains, “Since the concept is quite revolutionary, it takes us time to convince schools that they should shift to an  educational ERP system. As Lyceum’s implementation   means a complete transformation in an educational department’s processes, the sales cycle can vary from 15-90 days.” Some educational institutions find it quite challenging to transfer their existing manual records to the new system, which brings complete transparency to processes. Pacsoft has also observed   that educational institutions face regular budget constraints as they operate on yearly cycles; products therefore have to be pitched during the beginning of an academic session to gain management approval.

The consortium that Pacsoft has formed will train teachers and students to use the software, and help them aid their educational institutions. The tie-up’s   goal is to consolidate the educational market by helping institutions acquire relevant technologies at a low cost.

Currently, Lyceum is available only on the .NET platform. Before migrating to .NET, Lyceum was also available on DOS and NetWare. Explains Sait, “We   were looking for an integrated approach using the .NET platform as it helps in seamless integration and sharing of information.”

 

The education surge in China

Suhit writes about an article in the Financial Times on the economics of education in China which says,

An education revolution is sweeping through China. New students are pouring into secondary schools and universities at a phenomenal rate. The consequences for China’s economic growth will be enormous, and mostly positive.

The increase in schooling reflects not just a greater supply of school places provided by the state, but strong demand from families for education. This demand stems from the fact that the economic value of schooling in the country has risen rapidly.

In the late 1980s, the financial return on primary education for Chinese families – that is, the average increase in annual income expected for each additional year of schooling – was only around 4 per cent, about half the average rate for developing countries.

By 1999, according to Zhao Yaohui at at Peking University’s China Centre for Economic Research, the figure had more than doubled to nearly 10 per cent. Gains for higher education were far greater. The return on technical school education rose from 29 to 51 per cent, while the return on college education soared from 38 to 72 per cent. The only level of schooling for which returns did not increase was junior high school.

A key fact about China’s educational system is that access to university is based on a national examination system. Though by no means wholly equitable, this system at least gives a chance to students from poor families.

This relative equality of educational opportunity remains one of the most crucial differences between China and other developing countries with high levels of income inequality, notably India and the Latin American nations. Those countries generally have stratified education systems, in which the elites are served by expensive private schools that feed into the universities. Poorer people have to make do with ill-funded public schools that do not provide a route into higher education. This results in societies where income inequality is entrenched and social mobility is limited.

China, by contrast, has high inequality but also relatively high social mobility, because of widespread access to standardised education and the centralised university exam system. Maintaining this mobility will be a major challenge of the coming decades. But China has made a good start.