Digital Education - what all we need in a Learning software?
Our education sector is going through one of the hardest times by the covid crises and it is continuing for the past one and half years. There is no specific system, process and tools available for the public education as of today even though the digital education takes place through tablets, WhatsApp, Google Docs, Google Meet, Zoom and other TV Channels. The lack of a good digital learning platform for our public education is still a major drawback and this has created a big crisis in the education sector as a whole.
Today we have good digital learning tools available in the market but the fact is that still there is no integrated digital learning software available for the schools especially in the public education system. Agree that there are certain schools having this facility but majority of the students doesn’t have a good platform to continue their learning due to lack of the integrated platform. Last day Hon’ble Chief Minister of Kerala Mr. Pinarayi Vijayan had expressed his views to improve the system in the coming days by implementing the basic infrastructure to all segment of people in the state. Along with this infrastructure availability an integrated learning tool is also very important to improve the quality and equality of learning through digital channels.
What all we need in a digital learning software?
1.Digital Calendar:
We all know we had a time table in the school days. Like that in the digital platform also we required a full-fledged calendar. By using this calendar, the school admin/concerned teachers can set the timetable for each class/student. Such timetables should be visible in the home page/landing dashboard of student app/website. This will give a clear understanding about the school/subject schedules to the students. Currently in these covid times this is happening through WhatsApp groups and which doesn’t have any track and majority of the schools digital learning time is limited to max 2-3 hours per day. A digital calendar will solve all these glitches and the same can be used as an attendance system for students/teachers based on their check-ins to each slot.
2.Virtual Class Rooms:
The digital class room now running in the schools are either in google meet or zoom and majority of the schools using the free version of the software with limited feature, restricted occupancy and which will not give any logs to track the student /teachers/speakers (Whether they have joined? At what time? time spend in the room? left time? any network issue in between? etc).
The proposed digital platform should have an integrated virtual class room which will have support of audio and video conferencing facilities. Building an entirely new video conferencing software will be a tough task and time-consuming process. All the leading WebEx/video conference software providers exposed their APIs and which we can be consumed (Paid service) and this can be integrated with the learning platform and this will make the student life easy as they are always stay in single software for all these options. The school management will also get full logs on the class room. There are open source video conferencing tools are also available in the market with API.For reducing cost we can even think of that option as well. This will give a freedom to the software from third party product/API vendors.
The student can login to this virtual class room through the digital calendars only. Whenever a student is clicking on a defined time slot the corresponding class room will open.
3. Digital Library:
The digital library is the most important component of digital learning platform. Books/Digital content needs to be categorized based on the content. It will help the students for quick navigations. School text book can also be uploaded in to this as pdf format and this will ensure the possibilities of reading online. The most important aspect of digital library is its content and this content needs to be designed with modern tools like SCORM/TIN CAN formats and which will have API support as well. By using these facilities, we can even fetch the page by page activities done by the student over the content and this will create an interactive experience to the students/teachers. The flawless streaming to be ensured for the end user for the better user experience. Cloud deployment (Amazon S3 is my personal preference here) with media streaming [AWS Video on Demand] capabilities to be adopted here.
5. Assessment:
The feature is to asses the student progress on each subject. Teachers can assign assessment to the students an which will reflect in the student dashboard. Unlike traditional class room assessment here we can show a summary of the subject before the assessment starts. This will help the students to do a refresh before starting the exam. Since all these pre-configured no manual intervention required in between by the teachers and the same time students should be present and attend the same in the specified date and time. All the assessments scores will be real-time is another advantage of digital tools unlike traditional class room assessment.
5. Exam with Proctoring Technology:
The most important module in the digital learning is exam. In order ensure the integrity of the exams we can enable proctoring technology with the exam module. The proctoring tool will monitor the student through web cam throughout the exams. Any suspicious behaviour will lead to disqualification of the exams. This will force the students to keep all the norms and policies of proctoring exams. In the market there are good proctoring tools available with API.We can leverage the API and can integrate to our platform. This will ensure the exam module also covering inside our platform. We can even think of open source APIs to avoid dependency with other vendors and we can keep on improving the tool by doing R&D on it.
6. Chatbots:
An interactive chatbot will makes the students life much easier while working with this platform. Students can ask queries (Voice, text) to the BOT and through the inbuilt artificial intelligence mechanism BOT will respond to the students within seconds. Students no need of searching the entire platform if they are looking for an information. They can ask to the chatbot and the BOT will do the search and will pick the right information to the student.
7. Alerts - Communication System via WhatsApp / Message:
An inbuilt alert mechanism from the platform will ensure all the relevant information has been communicated with the students, teachers and parents on time. Integration with WhatsApp messaging will get more user attraction than traditional messaging. Since this messaging system also integrated with our platform, there is no manual intervention required from school admin/teachers to trigger a message. A scheduler in the platform will easily do the task automatically based on predefined rules.
8. Simulation Tools (Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality):
Integration with simulation tools will give a real life experience to the students using this platform. Comparing to AR, Virtual reality is bit costly for normal students as it requires additional devices to experience it also most of the base model mobiles doesn’t have much support on VR.So VR can be considered in a later stage but of course the possibilities of augmented reality can leverage in the initial phase itself of better user experience.
9. Scorecard and Student Progress Report:
Since this is an integrated platform all the scorecard will get automatically generated by the system and will be visible in the software. Parents can also login to our platform and acknowledge the progress report-based authentication can also be incorporated in order to avoid misuse of this feature by the students itself.
Of course, we have all these technology tools available today and many e-learning platforms in the market already enabled many of these features with them based on their targeted user category. But all we need is an integrated digital learning platform for the entire students in the country in order to ensure digital equality in all levels. Presently the tools which are available in the market is for the privileged class mostly but the aim of integrated digital platform to enable this facility including underprivileged in the country. This can be possible only through our government agencies.
Definitely an integrated digital learning platform will take our education system in to the next level. Lets not disturb covid and other pandemic students life going forward.
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