Next Learning Platform- An Ideal Companion for 21st-Century Smart Schools

All school administrations rely on multiple systems spread across numerous platforms for its academic and administrative activities. The successful working of a school involves the collaboration and corporation of all the stakeholders. In the present-day school setup, this is no easy task.

Consider the example of the examination procedure. The school has to collect the exam fee from the students. The teachers have to prepare the assessments and grade them. Report cards should be created and sent out to the parent. For all this, the school has to coordinate between multiple systems in the current scenario.

Schools have to deal with a number of challenges on an everyday basis. These include:

1. High probabilities of manual errors in managing academic and administrative operations
2. Integration of data across various administrative modules into one software
3. Accessibility to analytical tools to get a 360-degree view of students’ performance 
4. Finding the right technology partners, who are reliable and can assist ably
5. Monitoring the effectiveness of teaching and its impact on students’  performance
6. Identification of gaps in the prescribed lesson plans on a regular basis 
7. Transparency in communication between parents, students, teachers and principals
8. Availability of content across all online platforms like iOS, Windows and Android
9. Detailed  assessment and regular feedback on students’ performance 

Streamlining all these operations becomes a very mentally and physically taxing job.  Bringing all the academic and administrative activities in a school under one single umbrella can help solve these challenges. This is why today’s schools need a solution like Next Learning Platform.

What is Next Learning Platform?

Next Learning Platform is a powerful tool, designed in the form of school-in-a-box. It consists of the school management system (ERP), course management system (LMS), assessment management system and award-winning content. Meeting all the academic and administrative needs, Next ERP provides every stakeholder with a 360° overview of the day-to-day running of a school.

There are four essential components that encompass Next Learning Platform, making it a powerful allrounder tool for school. Let us see what each of these components are and how they help in running a school efficiently.

Next ERP

Shortage of time is the biggest challenge in administering a school on a daily basis. Endless paperwork, workload, and unavoidable errors are few of the regular complaints from administrators. These problems can make the job of an administrator seem like a herculean task. 

Next ERP is a solution that simplifies school management. It streamlines all the day to day operations of the school with just a few clicks. Next ERP comes with a number of modules that connect various processes, departments and stakeholders in a school. It takes care of all administrative operations to prevent school mismanagement. 

Features of Next ERP

• Enables vehicle tracking without a GPS device:  It helps the parents and school track school vehicles. If the vehicle has no GPS device Next ERP allows tracking with aid of a staff member’s smartphone.

• Provides secure storage of data: Next ERP double-encrypts all personal and confidential information of parents, students, staff and teachers. This prevents data theft and ensures data security. It is certified by Beagle for its data security features.

• Provides instant visitor validation: The software verifies a visitor’s details with the help of government documents, face recognition, and OTP validation.

• Customisable school documents: Allows the school to customise documents like report cards, fee templates, transfer certificates, etc. as per the requirements.

• Integrated CCTV and video surveillance system: Allows easy monitoring of school premises. It provides instant alerts if there is a security breach.

• Provides access via role-based system: helps protect school data by restricting access to information. The administrator can give access to employees’ based on their roles and designations.

• E-wallet: The software allows parents and students to make cashless payments.

Next LMS

In the present-day school set up, teaching has taken a new dimension. Apart from course planning, teachers perform several other time-consuming and intense activities. Parents have sky-high expectations which make it essential to ensure that they are delivering the best learning experience to students.

NextLMS is a collaborative, personalised academic management tool. It is a cloud-based solution that facilitates the effective exchange of resources between different stakeholders in a school. This tool encourages e-learning and expedites the creation, management and delivery of assignments, courses, documents and videos. 

Features of Next LMS:

• Pre created lesson plans and resource mapping: Allows teachers to easily check chapter summary, learning objectives, concepts, audio-visual modules etc. Teachers can customise the lesson plans as per their requirements.
• A vast resource library: Integrated with our digital classroom solution, TeachNext. Teachers can import educational content from YouTube and Khan Academy as well.
• Question and answer forum: Provides access to Next Gurukul, India’s largest online community for learners. 
• Caliper Analytics: It gives the teacher a real-time analysis of the learning activities of the student. The teachers can closely monitor students learning based on their consumption of resources.
• Examination: Enables teachers to create any type of exam structure, including the number of assessments and terms for each class. It sends regular notifications to parents about their wards academic progress through emails and text messages.
• Live lectures: Facilitates remote learning and ensures that learning can always continue with no disruptions. The teacher can just go live on LMS and students can attend it from anywhere anytime. The students can also revisit the recorded sessions at any later point.

Next Assessments

In a traditional classroom, teachers waste a lot of energy and time in preparing and grading assessments. Many a time, these assessments fail to help them understand the learning gaps of the students. Such methods of assessment are often mere promoters of rote learning and merely waste the teachers’ time and energy.

Next Assessment is a comprehensive assessment management solution that enables teachers to evaluate students on the basis of their ability. It allows the teachers to customise tests according to their requirements. Next Assessment provides periodic assessments, from formative to competitive exams for all classes spanning various platforms. It generates quick detailed reports for adaptive and static assessments as well. 

Features of Next Assessment:

• Question management system: A collaborative and process-driven question management system with over 5,40,000+ questions. The questions are tagged as per Bloom’s taxonomy. They cover over 29 state boards as well CBSE, ICSE, army board and IGCSE.
• Test Creation:  Allows teachers to create customised assessments with the help of preloaded templates, automating the process of test creation. This tool enables them to choose between static and adaptive assessments.

• Personalised Evaluation: It gives teachers an estimation of high performers and underperformers. For underperformers, they can identify areas of improvement and propose corrective measures.  
• Automatic Test Correction: The OCR software facilitates a quick scan of students’ answers in a digitised format. It provides readymade reports as well. 
• Assessment Management: Teachers can track students’ homework on a daily basis. They can check the number of students who have submitted their homework on or after the due date.
• Report Card Generation: It helps teachers upload exam results in our software and generate report cards with preloaded templates. It provides a complete picture of students’ progress in the form of graphical reports. 
• Global Calibration: This makes it easy for all stakeholders to see how well the students are performing academically. They can see where the student stand across our platform.

Next Education Courseware

Designed as per their individual learning needs, the courseware promotes the importance of Experiential learning, Enquiry-based learning and Traditional-learning.  It covers a range of subjects including Science, Physical education, Life skills, Yoga, Social science, commerce etc.

Features of Next Education Courseware:

• Integrated curriculum: Allows extensive integration of books, lab simulations and hands-on activities with Teach Next
• Flexible teaching hours: Provides a runtime of 8-10 minutes, leaving more time for teacher-student interaction
• Active learning: Gives timely pauses in between the content  for the teacher to initiate discussions around concepts
• Frequent content updation: Automatically updates content in accordance with the latest trends in the education sector
• Alignment with learning needs: Provides narration of the content in a neutral accent for better comprehension 
• Multiple intelligences: Provides content to students of varying abilities and multiple intelligences— visual, auditory and kinesthetic

Why Next Learning Platform?

The academic and administrative procedures should go hand in hand to ensure the efficient running of the school. Next Learning Platform facilitates this by bringing the school management and learning management solutions under a single platform. There are many benefits to such an integrated approach.

1. The teachers get more context about the students’ performance and submissions by looking at their attendance data
2. Communication between parents and teachers about the students’ performance, homework etc. becomes more open and easier
3. The time-table allows the sessions to be linked to exact dates. It provides accurate information on how much portion has been covered and what is left.
4. Teachers can easily determine the performance level of students, group them based on this and provide more personalised learning
5. They can see the performance of the student in a course, through the years through Next Assessments and opt different teaching strategies
6. Teachers can recommend resources to students based on their performance in the examination or depending on the course progress.

Key Features of Next Learning Platform

• Reduction of workload: A lot of the work becomes automated. This gives administrators and teachers ample time to focus on important projects.
• One-stop solution: NLP helps school integrate all of a school’s data spread across various modules into a single software. 
• Enabler for teachers: It provides teachers with a wide variety of online tools to create lesson plans and question papers. They have the flexibility to import content from various resource libraries online.
• Flipped learning. NLP allows teachers to implement a flipped classroom model. Teachers can share content with students anytime. This allows them to come prepared for the class.
• Parent engagement: NLP helps schools engage with parents on a regular basis. It makes it very easy for schools to communicate with parents about a child’s progress throughout an academic year.
• Valuable insights: NLP provides school administrators with detailed insights into the day-to-day running of a school. Parents, principals and teachers can identify how well students are performing and where they stand across our platform.
• Collaboration between stakeholders: NLP facilities transparency in communication between parents, principals, students and teachers. It provides real-time tools to ensure swift coordination and collaboration among various stakeholders.
• Data Security: With advanced data encryption features and strong access-control policies, NLP promises complete data security. 
• Availability across all platforms: The NLP platform is accessible across all online platforms like iOS, Android and Windows.