ICT based methods employed at SIMATS

 The ideal teaching method should facilitate learning and understanding without being time extensive. The adoption of technology into teaching and learning has drastically improved the rate of delivery of information and also facilitates better understanding through the use of visual aids made available to students at all times. This enables students to learn at their convenience as well as improve ease of understanding.

SIMATS University employs a vast array of ICT based methods to ensure effective delivery of information to all our students at all times. The entire campus is wi-fi enabled and all students are given access to our exclusive e-content across their mobile devices and iPad tablets. Around 2600 iPad tablets have been provided to our students to allow ubiquitous access to educational content at all times. There are 300 classrooms which are equipped with smart boards and are connected with the university wide wi-fi which enables recollection of learning material during class.

The learning material is uploaded to online learning management systems such as schoology, ibooks and google classrooms, to which every student is enrolled. There are 47 Schoology courses and 1000 ibooks currently made available to students and faculty for seamless dissemination of information. Faculty are also trained in these digital systems and prepare ibook chapters for our flipped class and MILA teaching systems. Approximately 250 ibooks have been completed so far for the dental college alone and have been made accessible through ipads provided for all students in our campus. We also host an incredibly useful Journal Management system (JMS) which enables multi-disciplinary journal discussion since it is made accessible to all faculty in all departments thereby eliminating the need to hunt around for rare and expensive articles. The JMS currently houses 32,428 articles with more articles updated periodically at regular intervals. These facilities enable full access of subject specific content to our faculty and students throughout their tenure.

All faculty and students are also enrolled in the Kaizala communications application to enable monitoring attendance with time and geotagging during work from home sessions in the lockdown duration. The Kaizala application facilitated around 7300 communication exchanges during the online lecture sessions in the lockdown period. The University-provided Institutional mail accounts for over 9800 faculty and student members allowed the use of google meet for online sessions of 100 students simultaneously (Free accounts can only accommodate 40 students at one time). The University also provides subscribed access to online scientific publishing databases such as Wiley, EBSCO, Proquest with over 57 subscriptions to enable students and faculty to update their scientific awareness and knowledge. The University also allows the use of paper pile citations manager to enable ease of adding citations to scientific manuscripts for faculty and students alike and resulted in a massive output of over 2300 manuscripts.

With all these facilities, we are happy to report that 100% of our faculty employ ICT based teaching methods for their teaching sessions.