The Internal Quality Assurance Cell (IQAC) at our university was established in 2018 with one of the faculty members being in charge of the cell in the capacity of Director/Deputy Director. The IQAC committee has been constituted as mandated by the UGC. An internal education quality policy has been created to regularly ascertain the quality of teaching and learning processes. The IQAC contributes significantly towards institutionalizing quality assurance.
A working internal education quality document based largely on the parameters defined by National Board of Accreditation (NBA) has been created to regularly monitor the satisfactory compliance of teaching learning processes by each school. The document is reviewed by the Deans from time to time to ensure the quality of education being imparted.
The two significant contributions are digital transformation and feedback mechanism for teaching effectiveness.
Digital Transformation
The objective of this initiative was to digitize and promote E-Governance within the University thereby boosting administrative and academic efficiency with reliable, secure and easy-to-use enterprise platforms that seamlessly integrate with academic and administrative procedures. The adoption of IT related changes enabled the University to get better equipped with technology development and data maintenance.
The implementation of an ERP system (Maitri, Juno Campus) has enabled the University to deliver academic and administrative requirements effectively. Modules like Students Life Cycle Management (SLCM), Financial Aspects, Mess Management (Student’s dining), Human Resource Management (HRM), Learning Resources (Library), Payroll, etc., are integrated on this platform. The implementation of the ERP system helped us to eliminate unnecessary paperwork, reviews, approvals, and duplication of efforts. The Students’ Academic Information System (SAIS) helped us simplify the information retrieval process enabling better accessibility to data so that various offices can focus more on analysis rather than transactional issues. This feature also assists the University authorities to be better informed, speed up decision-making process, maintain an end-to-end feedback system, and improve resource utilization.
BMU also implemented a local social network enterprise within the University (CollPoll, Butterfly Innovations). It provided information and kept updating students and faculty members on upcoming events, conferences, seminars, etc., thus improving student engagement. Provisions for electronic approvals like shuttle booking, booking library student rooms, gate pass approvals, no dues, complaints, migration certificates, requests to change mess etc., are sought through this platform. The CollPoll platform helped the student community and the university administration meet the daily operational requirements easily and efficiently.
Quality initiatives in Teaching Effectiveness and Feedback Mechanisms
Under the guidance of IQAC the university has created the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Development (CTLD) to conduct various training programs for faculty members. The primary objective of the center is to equip the faculty members acquire the required skill sets for discharging their duties effectively as well as to improve their quality of teaching, research, and administration. The center also supports the career growth of faculty members and promotes the overall academic development of the University. The CTLD conducts workshops, seminars, academic reflections and invites senior academicians to share their experience on a regular basis. to facilitate learning, knowledge creation and making future leaders.
CTLD along with IQAC revamped the course feedback mechanism to ensure teaching effectiveness and has laid out a well-defined policy. The process now ensures that course related feedbacks are much more self- reflective from the faculty perspective and not just dependent on end semester student feedback. Therefore, the policy ensures that the faculty receives feedback from peers before the semester, qualitative and quantitative feedback directly from the students through open houses and the program office during the semester and finally an end semester quantitative rating followed by the faculty’s own subjective reflection at the end of the semester.
