Literacy and Numeracy Drive system unveiled

LAHORE The online real time data about Literacy and Numeracy Drive (LND) system developed by the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) in collaboration with School Education Department for quality teaching and learning in Punjab was made public at a press briefing by Dr Umar Saif, Chairman PITB, Friday.

Speaking on the occasion, Dr Umar Saif said with the LND system now Punjab had no ghost school, teacher or fake admission anymore and added the literacy and numeracy data had been made public at: http:// open. punjab.gov.pk/ schools. This data was generated from tablet-based quizzes for grade 3 students from across the Punjab schools. Over 6.7 million geo-tagged quizzes were conducted across 17 Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) in the last two years and data about the same was made public while results from all these quizzes were being published in real-time for everyone to see, he added.

Dr Saif said a few countries of the world had such system to measure the learning outcome, which has been initiated in the Punjab by random visits of Monitoring and Evaluation Assistants (MEAs) to collect real time data through tablet-PC based student assessment app linked to an extensive question bank tagged with the relevant SLOs for preparation of result cards for review by the chief minister during stock-take after every three months to assess how much students of 53,000 schools were learning or understanding through measuring their performance. He said the initiatives had been recently lauded by the World Bank and other donor agencies.

He said the system also recorded the missing utility facilities like boundary wall, washroom, water and electricity in schools, which has overall much improved now. The particulars of 14 million students, their parents and 325,000 teachers were verified from Nadra through their Computerised National Identity Card (CNIC).

About 329,000 students are assessed monthly. Almost 6.7 million assessments have been conducted by MEAs till now. The data is shared with education administrators via an online dashboard and SMS-alerts, he added. Dr Saif said it was being considered to move towards regime to monitor private schools’ education quality as well to have comprehensive data about literacy, quality teaching and learning in collaboration with the management of these institutions.