AP Govt ties up with Microsoft to help monitor the dropout rate in Visakhapatnam schools

The government of Andhra Pradesh is making a move to develop the education rate in government schools. In this process, the government is concentrating on the dropout level of the students from the schools in Visakhapatnam district.

Based on Machine Learning and Analytics, the government has observed that there would be around 19500 dropouts from government schools in Visakhapatnam in the academic year (2018-2019). In an effort to reduce the dropout rate, the government has tied up with Microsoft.

The application, powered by Azure Machine learning, will help to process data which is related to students and find patterns based on gender, socioeconomic demographics, academic performance, school infrastructure and teacher skills. By fetching the data, the district education officials in Visakhapatnam will be able to concentrate on students who are most likely to drop out. This will help the officials to interact with these students and their parents as well.

The 2800 government schools in Visakhapatnam hold a student strength of around 2 lakh and with the information collected from Azure, the key problems the students are facing include insufficient furniture, deficient toilet infrastructure, etc.

An enrollment drive will be conducted in the city from April 23 to April 30 to encourage new admissions and encourage dropouts to rejoin.

The officials also said, “The drive also aims at increasing enrolments in government schools by raising awareness about the advantages of public schools. We will use the predictive data to track, counsel and address the issues of the students, who are likely to drop out next academic year.”

Source: Times of India