The review of each course that has been taught in a programme is a necessary and critical academic process.

It is an ongoing assessment of

•         What we intended to deliver- mapping with the curriculum  plan,

•        How we are delivering,

•       What needs to be changed

•       Lean Thinking to Course Review Process

To achieve this objective, we need to incorporate the Lean principles in the following manner:

•       Firstly empower each faculty designing or developing the course to take ownership of the course,

•       Secondly assign them the task of Identifying the tasks, the value add and waste ones,

•        Thirdly to review the processes for continuous improvement.

•       COURSE REVIEW PROCESS

Course Review process of a course/ subject/ module  was studied according to the key principles to go lean :

HOW PEOPLE WORK,HOW PEOPLE CONNECT and HOW PROCESS OPERATES

 The following process maps were developed which define two states,

•       Figure 3:Current State and

•       Figure 4: Future State

•       Process Maps

•       The second process map was prepared after the first process map was brainstormed among faculty members and the wastes were identifies in terms of:

•       Resources, Time, Capacity, Delay, Over-processing or Incorrect Processing, Talent, Motion, Assets, Knowledge And Defects

•       Lean Thinking to Course Review

The strategic goal and objective of the Course Review is to have a Better course content and delivery.

Applying Lean thinking  can help to:

•       have learnings from last delivery of course

•       eliminate non-value add activities

•        manage faculty and time well

•       and develop a strive for continuous improvement

•       Cloud Computing

•       The popularity of the term Cloud computing can be attributed to its use in marketing to sell hosted services in the sense of Application Service Provisioning that run Client server software on a remote location.

•       Design

•       Characteristics

•       Agility

•       Application programming interface(API)

•       Agility improves with users' ability to re-provision technological infrastructure resources.

•       Cost 

•       Device and location independent

•       Virtualization technology allows servers and storage devices to be shared and utilization be increased. Applications can be easily migrated from one physical server to another.

•       Multitenancy enables sharing of resources and costs across a large pool of users thus allowing for:

–      Centralization of infrastructure in locations with lower costs (such as real estate, electricity, etc.)

–      Peak-load capacity increases (users need not engineer for highest possible load-levels)

–      Utilisation and efficiency improvements for systems that are often only 10–20% utilised.

•       Reliability is improved if multiple redundant sites are used, which makes well-designed cloud computing suitable for business continuity and disaster recovery.

•       Scalability and elasticity via dynamic ("on-demand") provisioning of resources on a fine-grained, self-service basis near real-time, without users having to engineer for peak loads.

•       Performance is monitored, and consistent and loosely coupled architectures are constructed using web services as the system interface.

•       Security could improve due to centralization of data, increased security-focused resources, etc., but concerns can persist about loss of control over certain sensitive data, and the lack of security for stored kernels. Security is often as good as or better than other traditional systems, in part because providers are able to devote resources to solving security issues that many customers cannot afford. However, the complexity of security is greatly increased when data is distributed over a wider area or greater number of devices and in multi-tenant systems that are being shared by unrelated users. In addition, user access to security audit logs may be difficult or impossible. Private cloud installations are in part motivated by users' desire to retain control over the infrastructure and avoid losing control of information security.

•       Maintenance of cloud computing applications is easier, because they do not need to be installed on each user's computer and can be accessed from different places.

•       The National Institute of Standards and Technology's definition of cloud computing identifies "five essential characteristics":

•       On-demand self-service. A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider. Broad network access. Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and workstations).

•       Conclusion

The main learnings from the study are :

•       Lean Implementation is in its nascent stage in Education Sector

•       There exists ample opportunities for improvement and sufficient learnings are present which can be derived from other sectors to the education sector.

•       It should be inculcated as an ongoing self-improvement process, where each stage evolves and improvises from the next stage.

•        The facilitators for this process are the staff, the infrastructure and mainly the vision and mission of the organization.

Conclusion

•       All the efforts should be closely monitored and controlled.

•       Although Lean Practices help organizations to eliminate waste, they also involve lot of hard work by empowering people with responsibility and ownership.

•       Lean Implementation will bring several benefits including a no blame environment, lesser errors, availability of information, opportunities, growth, learning and development, and improved customer satisfaction and this thing can be done through cloud computing and outsourcing .