IBM focuses on smarter education

IBM along with its partners Merce Technologies and Focuz announced a number of offerings to drive smarter education in Pune. Built for forward looking academic institutions, trusts, and professional colleges, these smarter education solutions, embrace technologies such as cloud computing, open source systems, virtualization, and analytics, and help transform educational systems—making them more interconnected to access and share resources, instrumented to gather key data, and intelligent to enable innovation and smarter decision-making.

“There has never been a better time to make our education technology systems smarter,” said Ramesh Narasimhan, Director, General Business, IBM India/South Asia. “With better management, measurement and processes, the effectiveness of school systems could be raised significantly at the existing spending levels.”

As part of this initiative, a “Smart Education Summit” an interactive session for key decision-makers of Maharashtra's largest education trusts and academic bodies was recently held in Pune to showcase these unique offerings.

“This will help educational institutions delivering a better academic environment to their students and faculty, strengthening relationships with alumni and recruiters, enhancing brand image and differentiating themselves as forward-thinking centers of academic excellence,” said Shuvam Misra, Founder-CEO of Merce Technologies.

IBM and their partners have been addressing the fast changing needs of the education sector for many years. Their Smart Classroom initiative is a worldwide initiative to address these needs. These solutions drive down costs, allow efficient and effective management of the student lifecycle, protect confidential information, help in sharing of academic study material, and enable collaboration among students and teachers. All this allows the management of the institute to focus on their core management functions and helps to build a great academic environment.

Through technology based in cloud computing, students in schools, colleges and universities can access the most advanced education content, software applications, and computing and storage resources. If an education system becomes instrumented—able to capture and convey critical data, such as attendance, grades and enrollment in activities—it can gain a real-time perspective into how a student or school is doing, where intervention is needed, and what is working across institutions and throughout their lifetimes.

The Merce suite of products delivers the core networking, messaging, collaboration and information protection services which any campus needs. For instance, the Merce MailGate delivers class-leading spam protection and perimeter email security. Similarly, the digital content library solution from Focuz offers centralized repositories of academic and research content which can be hosted in a data center and made available to the entire campus with controlled access. Also, Techfocuz U-Governance is rated as a top ERP solution, based on open source technology on Linux platform. These products when integrated with IBM’s certified and scalable hardware form the information backbone of a campus—from a small college to a multi-disciplinary university campus.

An intelligent school system can provide its leaders with the tools and insights they need to make smarter decisions at the system level. Leaders and teachers can gain a full picture of student performance and make decisions at the system level that can enhance learning, spot troubling trends earlier and take action, and instill a sense of common purpose in working toward goals.