“Prashikhyak” ICT Dashboard launched to improve the quality of teacher training in Odisha

Bhubaneswar, Jan 28: The Directorate of Teacher Education and SCERT in collaboration with UNICEF, Odisha and technical support from SDRC, has launched the Teacher Education Dashboard for Teacher Education Institutes to monitor progress against the annual academic calendar and improve the quality of teacher training along with reliable data linking with the professional profile of teachers. It is a unique platform that aggregates information on HR, infrastructure and academic indicators across TEIs. The dashboard developed as a one stop monitoring solution for all TEIsand follows uniformity in implementing the unified academic calendar. The dashboard has opportunity to publish the unified training and academic calendar for all the TEIs. Apart from the above purpose, the dashboard has the common repository that allows the teacher education institutes equipped with network to share own knowledge products with other peer TEIs. The content management system captures success stories, guidelines, and relevant knowledge products on TEIs. The State and district level factsheet/dashboard generated on key performance indicators like laboratories and other resources, access to toilets and drinking water, enrolment disaggregated through intake capacity, gender, social category etc. There are possible options to tie to other chart type, download the chart as image file for further use as well as tracking the attendance of teacher educators and staff by each institute, aggregated daily and monthly. Faculties would be able to login to the dashboard through a given user ID and password to access information, post queries and upload institution wise academic and HR information. Similarly, faculties from the directorate can login to access information, provide guidance and address the queries of faculties and student teachers. In this manner, faculties can interact with the Directorate and seek their guidance on the best academic performance. This dashboard also provides opportunities to develop mechanism to capture students’ feedback in the application for further analysis and corrective actions. While welcoming the guests, Gangadhar Sahoo, (OAS), Director, TE & SCERT highlighted, on the knowledge of ICT that required for pre-service training, because this integrated technological knowledge helps a prospective teacher to know the world of technology in a better way by which it can be applied in future for the betterment of the students. The dashboard creates a common repository that provide decision makers with qualitative reliable data for effective decision making and planning, rolling out training programs as well as linking the training inputs to performance-based incentives. Training of faculties is planned as the next step, so that they are able to fully navigate and use the dashboard and support student teachers in accessing and utilizing the dashboard for effective use. Minister for School and Mass Education  Samir Ranjan Dash, highlighted that this dashboard had come at a very pertinent time as it is the need of the hour to ensure all faculties and student teachers acquire knowledge on HR, Infrastructure, and academic information and make informed choices for continuing education during the unprecedented education emergency because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The most impressive aspect about this dashboard is - this is a GIS based interactive dashboard with alert and notification system to enable real time tracking of the institutions and aggregated data disseminated through tabular form, Bar, Pie, cards to represent trends.