Chief Academic Officer at UNIVO Education

Leading EdTech Interventions

- Leading the digital transformation and remote education initiatives in the University.

Director - Academics - Amity Directorate of Distance and Online Education & Amity OnlineVice President - Univo EdTech LLP (Amity Group) Responsible for enhancing the quality of education offered in the institution. Ensure the institution has enough qualified and competent educators. Conduct internal curriculum reviews to ensure content is current, relevant, and meets quality standards.  Involve in development of new academic programs and oversee the integration of learning technologies into the teaching process. Oversee all aspects of education quality and teaching delivery and student services.  Provide individual and university wide instructional coaching that is data driven while ensuring that curriculum is aligned with the relevant standards and assessments. This includes implementation of periodic standardized assessments that will provide data to inform instruction. Mentor both the teaching staff and students and liaise with internal and external stakeholders. Build close relationships with peers, senior administrators, parents and students, to make effective and well-informed decisions on a variety of educational and noneducation matters.

Drive digital transformation initiatives and provide strategic leadership supporting a set of responsibilities including, student relationship, student satisfaction & retention, information and pedagogical technology, program design and development, regulatory compliance and business continuity, examination management, quality management, information reporting systems and business intelligence, business process transformation and management, staff development initiatives for the Center for Continuing Education of UPES.

> Lead the Business Process Transformation and Business Process Improvement initiatives for the Center for Continuing Education of UPES.> Evaluate, establish and implement the short term and long term, e-learning strategy for the university with main focus on CCE.> Act as the process expert for CCE, in all aspects of regulatory matters, business process changes, including design, re-engineering, continuous improvement and deployment and ensure the business processes are effective, efficient and standardized to the extent practical.> Work with the Laureate Global teams and internal stakeholders to ensure alignment of the CCE IT backbone and e-Learning, with the Global standards set by Laureate.> Responsible to drive student re-registrations.> Responsible for the budgeting and managing Operations and IT expenses for CCE.> Implement and manage 2 cloud servers used to host the website and web applications used by CCE students.> Drive student services and customer satisfaction enhancement initiatives.> Ensure continuous training & development of team members through appraisal and counseling processes as laid down by company policy, so as to ensure high productivity and low turnover of staff.

Job Profile:To optimally manage the manpower and other resources so as to deliver the company products at right time thereby ensuring high level of customer satisfaction and high contribution to fixed costs. To develop new products for enhancing the company product line by utilizing developments in technology and feedback from the Sales Dept.

> Managed the overall startup Operations of NIIT in Thailand.> Responsible for hiring, development and review of entire staff. > Write, monitor and manage consistent adherence to companywide policies and procedures. > Manage the planning, design, development, implementation, and maintenance of the institution’s IT infrastructure, applications of the 2 Education Centers.> Design and development of new product under brand “blis” on Business English and Soft-skills training for the Thailand market.> Strategic Partner to Top Management on the planning and development of new markets, as well the expansion of existing markets.> Created and developed new tools required to support specific projects to protect IPR materials.> Responsible for the budgeting and the P&L management along with the Top Management, specific to various deals.> Relationship Management with partners and existing and new customers along with supporting the Marketing team with Technical pre-sales activities.

> Part of the Pilot team for setting up of the Oracle Partner Solution Center in India.> Plan, schedule and manage the execution of all the Partner Development and Enablement trainings for Oracle India Partners in Applications and Technology space.> Ensure 100% tracking and MIS of all Partner Enablement trainings in India.> Support Global and APAC rollout of Partner trainings in India.> Vendor Management and ensuring 100% compliance in services provided by them.> Record and measure the success factors of all trainings, and provide constructive feedback on improvement areas to the concerned individual/group.> Work with Hardware partners to ensure the smooth implementation and functioning of the datacenter.> Support the Solution Architects in developing POCs for various Oracle partners in SI and ISV space.

> Plan, develop, schedule and manage the delivery of all Training Projects undertaken by the NIIT Enterprise Learning Solutions group for various Government departments (both state and central), PSUs, BPOs and SW Development houses.> Lead a team of 20 IT and Soft-skills trainers of NIIT.> Managed and maintained a pool of Freelance trainers on IT and Soft-skills.> Plan, develop and implement strategy for staff training and development. Establish and maintain appropriate systems for measuring necessary aspects of staff training and trainee’s performance management systems. > Participated in organization wide initiatives around Quality, Process improvement and skill development.> Plan departmental/functional training budgets, forecast costs, staffing/resource plan, and delegate numbers as required by organizational planning and budgeting systems. > Evaluated effectiveness of training and development programs and utilize relevant evaluation data to revise or recommend changes in instructional objectives and methods.> Participated in Pre-Sales support and conducted TNA if required and designed customized training courses and programs necessary to meet training needs, or manage this activity via external provider(s). > Identify, select and manage external training and accreditation bodies, agencies and providers necessary to deliver required training to appropriate standards. > Plan and deliver training courses personally wherever needed. > Recruit, manage and develop direct-reporting staff. Conduct Half Yearly and Yearly Performance reviews for the team.

> Handled multi-location Team of 30 Engineers in Enterprise Platform Support (EPS) (divided between Delhi and Pune) for Microsoft Windows 2000 and 2003 Servers that catered to the Server Performance related calls from Corporate Customers of Microsoft. > Prepared individual trending of engineers based on Customer Satisfaction verbatim and call/case monitoring to coach them and identify their training needs. > Coached the team on refining the language, customer service, and technical skills.> Conducted Quarterly and Yearly Performance reviews for the team members.> Managed the Queue as Duty Manager on a rolling basis to look at after the real time schedule adherence in IEX versus the call flow in CMS and Centergy (Microsoft Internal tool) to meet the SLA and keep the cost per call under check.> Participated in the weekly Performance review Calls with the client and strategize course of action/corrective actions to meet business needs. Deciding the monthly scheduling of the engineers for different shifts in coordination with the client.> Actively involved with the recruitment team for internal and external hiring.

> As a Team Leader of a pilot process of Microsoft Networks (MSN), involved in the Process Transition to the Mumbai Center and later its migration to another site in Mumbai. > Responsible to coordinate with the technology helpdesk to setup the tools needed for the process along with the background network.> Worked closely with the Microsoft and Wipro technical team as a Technical SPOC for the Process to ensure the smooth functioning of the technology.> Looked after the team allocation and worked closely with the Transition Team and the Microsoft trainers and officials, to take the hand over to the Operations. > Worked closely with the team of 25 members in terms of their motivation, performance feedbacks and training needs, and train them on customer service/ soft skills and technical skills, to bring them up the learning curve and ensure good performance out of them. Keeping a check on attrition, and SLA delivery of the team and the Floor.

> Job responsibility as IT technical Consultant included managing a team of 10 faculties for training department. Batch scheduling and training senior batches was also a part of responsibility.> Training high-end corporate batches like Bangladesh Navy/Customs Officers.> Support the reuse of technical knowledge (contribute to knowledge management processes).> Schedule and impart high-end “Train the Trainer” programs in two centers of Aptech in Bangladesh, on new technologies and specialized topics.> Set up and maintain the computer lab of 45 computers. Network was done on Star Bus topology with computers in different clusters and included Windows NT, Windows 2000 and SuSE Linux Server. > Additional responsibilities included advising the management on implementation and design of new curriculums and projects and working closely with the management on employee and student motivation.> As a Project Manager, established a Software Development team of 12 as initiative to diversify the organization and working as a Project Manager. The project in its initial month grabbed prestigious orders of top clients in the area worth 3 Lakhs Bangladeshi Taka. The development environment included Visual Basic, SQL Server, ASP and IIS. > Support pre-sales activities as technical specialist and maintain customer relationship. > Contribute and lead the process and requirement analysis processes, the solution/service design and creation process and the solution implementation.

> Managed a team of 5 Faculties for technical training department. Scheduling and Logistics management was also part of responsibility. > Ensure quality of service and training delivery. > Handling senior batches.> Conduct T3 for new trainers on new technologies.> Additional responsibilities included total revamp of the lab network of 20 PCs and convert it from Peer to Peer to Client Server based architecture on Star Bus topology with Novell Netware 4.11, Windows NT 4.0 and SuSE Linux Server at the backend.

> Primary responsibility included imparting training to students under NIIT curriculum and Conduct various corporate courses.> Led a team of 6 trainers and was responsible for their skill, upgrade, batch allocation etc.> Train the students on presentation skills.> Worked for the implementation, maintenance and troubleshooting needs of a Center Management Software of NIIT that included daily accounting and student profile management.> Other responsibilities included training the marketing and the counseling team. Help in conducting the Bhabishya Jyoti Scholarship Exams for the region. Oversee and implement the possible improvements in the training delivery process, basis the feedback from the trainees.> Also a part of the Software development team involved in creating and maintaining FoxPro based applications. Worked in the capacity of S/W developer. Coordinated between different developers and clients.