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© Proceedings of the Ruhuna Quality Assurance Sessions 2021 (RUQAS 2021)
st
21 September 2021

IQAC’s Role in Maintaining the System

The IQAC maintains and manages the system and IQAC's official email account is used for this
purpose. The Chairperson of the IQAC presents the automatically generated summary of the events at

the last Faculty Board of the year. In addition, the chairpersons/coordinators/patrons may present

detailed activity reports at the Faculty Board meetings. The data in the system will be provided to the
respective presenters upon request. The submission of the information to the faculty board by the

IQAC not only reports the activities officially but also encourages the office bearers to actively engage
in feeding the information to the system. Until the system becomes familiar with the staff members,

IQAC will send frequent reminders to encourage uploading new information. Since the system is still

under testing and validation, new strategies will be added to the system to enhance its functionality.

Discussion and Conclusions

An analysis of the nature of the events will provide information such as frequently addressed topics,
inadequately addressed topics, inactive associations/societies/committees, level of participation and

sources of funding. This information will provide an assessment of the performance of different
associations, committees, and societies. The committees can be advised and guided based on their

performance in order to improve on their proposed activities. Further, the performance of the office

bearers of the student-based bodies can be assessed through this system to determine the eligibility for
reappointments and issuing references.

Despite the benefits of having this system, getting the users to upload information voluntarily appears

to be a challenge. Even within a few weeks after the completion of an event, retrieval and archiving of

the details is a tedious task due to several reasons. Main reasons are the reluctance of the relevant staff
members to compile information, absence of designated officers to carry out the process and absence

of a system or a format to compile the information. The first reason mentioned above is linked to the
attitudes while the others are linked to the facilities. Carefully selected strategies should be adopted to

encourage the users to feed the information. Such strategies need to be reviewed and approved at
appropriate administrative bodies before incorporating into the system.

In conclusion, this system provides a structured platform to enter the information about the events
organized at the Faculty of Agriculture, University of Ruhuna. The proposed structure could be used as

a prototype for future developments of the MIS. The strategies to encourage the users to upload
information to the system should be reviewed and applied with necessary approvals. This system can

be introduced to other faculties and universities with necessary changes.

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