Real-time Technology Enabled Monitoring of Teachers in Gujarat

The government of Gujarat has initiated a new real-time technology-enabled surveillance plan to keep an eye on over 1.95 lakh school teachers from the new academic session starting from June 10.

Real-time Technology Enabled Monitoring

The aim of Real-time Technology Enabled Monitoring is to improve the quality of education by ensuring that teachers stick to their assigned tasks on a daily basis. The features of the monitoring system are:

• Poor monitoring of teachers had resulted in absenteeism and non-seriousness. The new system aims to tackle it.
• The monitoring involves a tech-equipped ‘command and control centre’, which is being set up in Gandhinagar along with a call centre.
• The people from the call centre will ask a series of questions to teachers and record their responses on Google forms. They would feed the data into Excel sheets. The data would be collaborated and analysed in the command and control centres.
• The caller would ask about 10 questions, on an average, from a set that has been strategically framed jointly by a team of experts under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan’s (SSA’s) quality enhancement cell and approved by the SSA officials and will change regularly.
• The data from the call centres and would be verified with online data collected by other means at different hours of the day to keep track of teachers, principals, and cluster and block resource centre coordinators.
• The control centre will be monitored on a daily basis by the heads of department under the Education Department, Director Primary Education, Director SSA, Gujarat Council of Educational Research and Training, Gujarat Secondary and Higher Secondary Education Board and Schools Commissioner.

The call centre system is seen as a solution to instances of cheating by some teachers.