UoS fully ready for online education: HEC

The Higher Education Commission has declared Sargodha University as fully prepared for imparting online education. In online education readiness, the university has been ranked at 4thposition in Punjab and 13th position in Pakistan. The HEC had conducted a survey to evaluate operational readiness of the universities for online education, including readiness for technology, evaluation, library, laboratory, course, faculty and students.
The evaluation criteria gave due consideration to the requirement of quality teaching by faculty and the limitation of internet facilities available to students.
Sargodha University was among those universities which switched to online education last March, as soon as the government imposed countrywide lockdown due to Covid-19 pandemic. The university adopted a multilayered oversight mechanism to ensure quality in online teaching and gave students facing internet connectivity issues the option to freeze spring semester.
The university also promptly developed its own Learning Management System (LMS), including the open source course bank for online teaching, while the foolproof software for online assessment is getting ready ahead of the exams scheduled for next month.
In terms of overall university readiness, the HEC has ranked Sargodha University as 100% ready. The criteria included personnel and material management as well as an operational LMS. For technological readiness, the university also scored 100%. The criteria included availability of technical platforms, packages, technological infrastructure, and LMS software.
Other scores of the University in the HEC ranking include 100% for library and laboratory readiness, 100% for evaluation readiness, 99.43% for course readiness, 90.78% for faculty readiness, and 85.71% for student readiness.
The comparative less percentage of student readiness is because the university had submitted the survey to HEC while the online spring semester was still under way. Henceforth, while complying with HEC guidelines for student readiness, its Directorate of Student Affairs set up a Complaints Cell to address the connectivity issues faced by students from remote areas, which significantly improved student readiness – a factor not accounted for in the HEC ranking.