Continuing from where I left my last blog 'Aspect of Quality in Colleges' in this article I wish to talk more about the Quality issue in colleges. As I love to evangelize that the sure shot way to improve the quality of the 'Learning Environment' of a college is to have an Intra College Portal and to utilize it well, I have frequently seen people going confused (students, teachers & directors alike) with "What really is this thing called learning environment?"

Lets first clear a misconception that Learning Environment includes the college infrastructure. It absolutely DOES NOT! No matter how swanky and corporate-office-like your building is, or how great your library/labs etc. are, your students can still manage to remain dumb. Quoting from one of the comments on my earlier blog - In Hindi this thing called learning environment is known as "Mahaul".

This 'mahaul' is created by people when they interact, share information and share knowledge. In other words it's the DAY-TO-DAY COLLABORATION amongst students, teachers and administrators which makes the Learning Environment of a college. The right kind of environment can be created even with an average infrastructure by removing bottlenecks of traditional (20th century) collaboration, and that’s precisely what an Intra College Portal does for you.

Lets see what kind of bottlenecks exist in the learning environment of educational institutes where intra college portal is not used...

- Synchronous Interaction: The only way people can interact traditionally is by meeting physically or over phone. If two persons or a group cannot synchronize their time, there is no interaction possible at all!

- Physical location: In a college there is a defined place for every kind of information sharing and knowledge sharing activity. Announcements are shared on notice boards, Teachers interact among themselves in the staff room, seminars & conferences happen in a seminar hall, self study is done in the library, and so on… And all of these places are located in the college campus. It’s a huge bottleneck!

- Narrow time frames: owing to the busy schedules of students and teachers and a strict timeline to complete the course, it becomes difficult for them to find time for extra interactions or group discussions or knowledge sharing outside the classroom.

- Hesitation in students for participation: 90% of the students in a class hesitate to participate in classroom discussions or to ask questions because either they are shy or they need a little time to arrange their thoughts and form sentences in their mind before they can raise hands and speak-up. Thats a serious bottleneck because it means 90% of potential knowledge remains locked or unshared in an average institute!

How an Intra College Portal can remove the above bottlenecks shall be discussed in my next blog. In the meanwhile you can think what would you do to remove these constraints existing in the mahaul of a college, if you are appointed the director there. (Feel free to share it as a comment)

Happy brainstorming :)