To ease the burden on teachers, the Tamil Nadu School Education Department will outsource the work of data entry into the Education Management Information System (EMIS) from the coming academic year. Introduced in 2018, the EMIS portal stores all information about schools, teachers and students in government, aided and private schools.
Currently, teachers’ job is to enter data. They petitioned the government to outsource this work because it was taking up their time during teaching periods.
School Education Department Secretary J. Kumaragurubaran said, “Work is underway to set up advanced technology laboratories in 8,500 junior high schools where teachers will be appointed for the task through the laboratories. Similarly, laboratory assistants were employed in approximately 6,000 secondary schools and universities. They will take care of the work under EMIS.”
These assistants will be assigned to 2-3 schools, each of which will also include primary schools, and will carry out the school’s work under EMIS. “They will start functioning from the first week of June,” he added.
Effortless information via WhatsApp channel
Meanwhile, the School Education Department has also planned to launch a WhatsApp channel to facilitate communication between teachers and the department. To facilitate this, the department is also in the process of authenticating 1.6 crore phone numbers on the EMIS portal.
Because the numbers were not verified, the department had difficulty following up on higher education as only 40% of calls were to the correct numbers. “To address this, a one-time password is now provided so that the correct phone numbers can be verified. 5 lakh numbers have been collected so far,” said Kumaragurubaran.
The WhatsApp channel would also be able to disseminate mass information in a tiny period of time. “Testing of this solution has been completed and will begin soon after collecting the phone numbers. This will also assist school principals communicate easily with parents regarding attendance or circulars such as distribution of books and sandals,” the secretary added.
