The Higher Education Commission (HEC) has enhanced the money for need-based scholarships programme for undergraduate studies from Rs2 billion in the financial year 2018-19 to Rs5 billion in 2019-2020 with assistance from the Ehsaas programme.
According to the report launched on the two-year performance of the incumbent Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) on Tuesday, a need-based scholarship fund was released in last week of June 2020 and disbursed amongst 119 public sector universities.
HEC also established a national centre of cyber security to deal with emerging challenge of cyber security. The report added that HEC will automate operational processes at 50 universities over a five year period. It will cover learning management systems, admissions, course management, grading, transcripts, scholarships, tuition fees, classroom assignments, staff recruitment and promotion, finance, HR, procurement and inventory. This will improve quality of education as well as financial reporting.
Automation of the first set of 10 universities completed, it added. Under the Higher Education Development, the project is in the process of creating a national level Higher Education Data Repository (HEDR) at HEC, consisting of granular level data related to students, faculty and staff for all universities.
HEDR will ensure that HEC will have access to up-to-date and correct information - personal as well as academic about the student body in the country. It will have details about all the faculty members, their academic background, research interests and publications.
This data will enable HEC to make data-driven decisions. The Human Resource Development initiative leading to PhD Programme of faculty development for engineering universities focuses on promoting innovative and relevant research, strengthening quality of education in affiliated colleges and connecting them to Pakistan Education and Research Network (PERN) for use of modern technologies, developing Higher Education Management System (HEMIS) and Cloud Infrastructure.
The report said that National Academy of Higher Education (NAHE) has been set up to invest in continuous professional development of faculty members in order to improve quality of teaching. An amount of Rs.8205.302 million has been utilized so far for this human resource development initiative, it mentioned.
Two year report stated that the HEC-China project, "Smart Universities: transformation through smart classrooms" will establish 100 smart classrooms in 50 universities and 50 sub-campuses through a PC-I costing 100 million Chinese Yuan received as grant assistance (Rs2.273 billion) from China. It added that under the China-Pak Economic Corridor (CPEC) a consortium Of China-Pakistan universities has been established to promote collaboration and exchange.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 19th, 2020.
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