ISLAMABAD, DEC 4: /DNA/- Five more universities sign up with the Higher Education Commission (HEC) to automate their entire operations from announcement of student admission to graduation. The HEC via its Higher Education Development Program in Pakistan (HEDP) project is bringing the world’s best technology solutions ’Maktab’ to Pakistani universities.
By automating their entire student life cycle, Maktab will reduce operational costs and provide state-of-the-art academic experience at remarkably subsidized costs. As many as 11 universities have already signed up for Maktab and post-system training sessions were conducted in September and November, respectively.
Recently, five more universities including the University of Narowal, Narowal; Emerson University, Multan; Women University, Mardan; Shuhada-e-Army Public School, University of Technology, Nowshera; and the University of Buner have joined-in too.
The senior management of these universities attended the training session at HEC main office, Islamabad. The closing session of this training was graced by Dr. Jameel Ahmed, Member IT and Mr. Awais Ahmed, Program Coordinator HEDP/Advisor global engagement. They encouraged the universities to take advantage of these investments and join HEC in the journey to equip their institutions with the best tools and technologies. All the leading global universities have already adopted automation including the entire student life cycle and HEC is committed to bringing Pakistani universities to par with global standards.
HEC has signed up with TMC for Maktab, as its technology partner to automate universities’ operations. Maktab is the state-of-the-art Student Lifecycle Systems (SLC) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) that will completely digitize their administrative, accounting, operations, and end-to-end student lifecycle processes from admission to degree completion. The systems enhance efficiency, and transparency and promptly provide key higher education data for decision making.
HEC via HEDP is making significant investments to deliver the best of global tools and technologies to higher education institutions in Pakistan. HEC’s strategic IT initiatives further include developing robust high-end Data Centers, High-Performance Computing, Pakistan higher education’s own indigenous local and secure cloud infrastructure that are already in progress at different stages of completion.
Two state-of-the-art Data Centers named Astrolabes have already been set up in Lahore and Karachi – one in University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore and the other in NED University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi. The HEDP IT team is now working on setting up cloud and high-performance computing in the same facilities. The idea is to make these high-end & secure data repositories available to Pakistani universities locally. In addition, the HEIs needing additional computing power didn’t have to pay heavy sums in foreign currencies to private businesses as the same services are available to these at subsidized rates along with local support.
HEDP is a 400 Million USD flagship project of HEC, funded by the World Bank, aimed to support research excellence in strategic sectors of the economy, improve teaching and learning, and strengthen governance in higher education.
 to automate their entire operations){kind=link}