UoS ready for online education

SARGODHA: The Higher Education Commission has declared University of Sargodha as fully prepared for imparting online education.

In online education readiness, the university had been ranked at fourth position 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. The University of Sargodha 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 varsity adopted a multilayered oversight mechanism to ensure quality in online teaching and gave students facing internet connectivity issue 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 ranked the varsity 100pc ready. The criteria included personnel and material management as well as an operational LMS. For technological readiness, the university also scored 100pc. The criteria included availability of technical platforms, packages, technological infrastructure, and LMS software.