Project Cappuccino - Automation of Higher Education

Cappuccino is an automation project for higher education through Information and Communication Technology. What? In this project, the entire functioning of a college or university becomes online. It is massive transition from the current paper based system to a completely computerized college campus. This system automates the triangular functions of:1. Academic Delivery: In this aspect, the entire teaching process becomes online. Students get all their lectures, notes, assignments, presentations, marks, grading online. This compliments and fills the gaps of classroom teaching. Automation of academic delivery makes sure that students can focus on listening to and understanding lectures, instead of getting confused between taking notes or listening to the professor. Students can access their lectures from sitting at home, at nights before exams, submit assignment from home, they do not have to travel to college to do that. Students get their grades and marks online. They get their time table information online. They do not have to wait for class to clear doubts; they can ask their professors on course chat, email and forums. This way, students do not miss their lectures even when they are absent due to sickness and even faculty can teach even when he cannot come to college due to sickness or due to other reasons. This saves them costs of photocopying, printing, traveling, phone calls, stationary etc. Students have lifetime access to the course lectures that they studied when in college, even after they graduate, so that when they want to refer and refresh their concepts they can always go back and study. 2. Academic Administration: This facet of the system completely centralizes the administration of the college and takes it online. Administrative staff can manage and monitor multiple campuses from one centralized location. They can manage all Departments, Programs, courses, faculty/students/staff personal & college records, batches, degrees, semester, sessions, seat category availability, designations. They can have live counseling for registering new students. Administrative tasks such as course registration, time tabling, grade management, transcript generation, managing study material for a large number of courses etc. that takes days and weeks and engages a large number of man power gets automatically managed by the system in a matter of seconds and minutes. There is an inbuilt MIS (Management Information System) that gives detailed reports. 3. Communication and Networking: This is another very important aspect to bring the communication system within the college from a traditional verbal and paper based system to a 10 times more efficient and professional mode of communicating. Every user (students, faculty, staff) of the college gets a unique college email. Professional college email helps students to interact with industry, research organizations, foreign universities, for jobs, hereby authenticating their identity as a registered student of the college. College administration can send mass notifications to thousands of students and faculty and staff in all sorts of combinations such as by program, by course, by department, by year of graduation, by year of admission, selectively etc. in less than a minutes time. This saves humungous amount of paper, printing and distribution costs and time.

An inbuilt alumni network, directory service and social network platform creates a college community for alumni to keep in touch with the college, their batch-mates, faculty and current students. Current students can network with their faculty, fellow students and alumni who can help them in getting jobs and internships. Students can start clubs and societies for extra-curricular and co-curricular activities. It also provides a very efficient tool for placements using which the industry can directly reach students of colleges for placements.

How? Service model The entire automation system is provided to the college as a service, which means users just need internet to access the system. This makes the system highly accessible. This takes care of the problem of lack of expertise required to run and maintain such a system in-house, problem of owning expensive server hardware, software and data centre facility within the college and risk of failure to implement and operate the system in-house. The service model makes the system highly affordable for the college.

Tie-ups benefits? We are tying up with a large number of companies across India and around the world where they would give special discounts and freeware to students by the virtue of using this system. This will save students thousands of rupees every month on computers, laptops, mobile phones, telephone services, books, train and airfare, travel, caf, restaurants, apparel etc.

Cost and savings? Typically an automation system has 100 percent return on investment, which means for every rupee spent, there is 2 rupees of savings. This system has an amazing ROI of more than 200%. The students have a saving of a minimum of Rs. 1000 per month. Major part of this comes from savings on costs of photocopying, printing, traveling, stationary, mobile phone calls. Then there are additional savings from exclusive discounts and offers from our large number of tie-ups with consumer goods and services companies for our students. The cost of the system is distributed on the students making it highly affordable for the college. Cost of this service is a very low monthly fee that is collected with the tuition fee every semester.

Additional Advantage for university and regulatory bodies The system is capable of inter-connecting all the colleges and creating a control hierarchy for administration of affiliated colleges by the university and of the university by the regulatory body.