Tamil Nadu's medical education data system to get tech upgrade

CHENNAI: A comprehensive State Medical Education (SME) and Learning Management System (LMS) will be implemented soon to modernise medical education data management and enhance learning processes in Tamil Nadu. This new system will be a modern data management-based system that includes profiles of teachers and students, teaching, learning processes and learning outcomes.

The Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency (TNeGA) has been entrusted with developing the system, which will integrate with existing government medical college websites and include features for feedback collection and analysis.

Stating that the LMS is a part of the Directorate of Medical Education and Research's efforts to improve medical education in the state, a senior TNeGA official told DT Next that to implement the LMS, the director of Medical Education and Research, who had already constituted a state-level task force and an institute-level working group, has sent a proposal for the to the state government seeking administrative sanction.

He said the TNeGA has prepared a detailed project report to identify a suitable integrator for developing the LMS. "A tender has already been floated to select the integrator," he said, adding, "The system is expected to go live within this year itself."

Pointing out that the project would cost around Rs 85 lakh, the official said the system will support both the user interface and data in Tamil and English.

Elaborating on the project, he said the dashboard in the LMS will be a landing page for the user, "The dashboard items and its contents will be displayed based on their user's roles and access permissions. It can be customised by the individual users."

Educational engagements like course schedules, teaching and assessment plans, learning materials, assignments, attendance, formative assessments, feedback, e-logbooks, mark-sheets, final certification, course alerts and deadlines would be among the plethora of features on the system, he said.

"The proposed system would be an internet-based application running from a centralised location. The LMS will also generate monthly web analysis reports and progress, which include popular pages of the website, hit rate and source domains, and average time spent on the website, list of referrers and visits from search engines," the official stated.