A recent post from Fred Noronha to the BytesforAll list

IN A WORLD WHERE THOSE WHO CAN'T TEACH, I.T. CAN

>From Frederick Noronha

CAN IT AND THE INTERNET help teacher's teach better, design courses better,
build improved learning environments, and support the learner more
adequately? Yes, say the experiences of technologists working in various
parts of India on issues such as these.

Online content is leading to flexible learning, web-based course-ware is
being worked on, as are novel authoring tools for course-ware design. There's
even attempts to design a ditigally-enabled self-learning course for adults.

These are other initiatives came up in a little-noticed international
conference on online learning, held some months back at Mumbai, called
Vidyakash. Let's look at some of them:

Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy Services points to it's authoring tool called
eVOLv, as a possible means of promoting e-learning. Madhuri Sawant of TCS
says this is a world with a "learn, unlearn and re-learn" mantra, and the
need for updating knowledge is very strongly felt in a changing world.

eVOLVe has a video window which displays a movie. It gives audio too.
Synchronised information appears in an adjacent window. Thumb-nails allow the
learner to navigate through the course. There's an inbuilt quiz tool -- to
test the learner's knowledge. Streaming video technology shortens download
time, and helps cope with bandwidth constraint. You get the transcript of
the script, in sync with the video. There are also other functionalities
that you can avail of while learning -- links, email, help and note-pad.

IIM-Bangalore, the Indian Institute of Management from the garden city, has
also been working on its own model of e-learning.

Say T R Madanmohan and Jai Ganesh of IIMB: "The Internet has enormous power
to improve the educational process. By using the Internet, education can be
personalised to each user, so that each student is given a targeted set of
materials based on his or her specific educational goals and previous
achievements. At the same time, the Internet allows material to be updated
dynamically, which creates an up-to-the minute resource for students."

IIMB, a 30-year-old institution considered to be one of India's best
business schools, keeps in touch with its alumni through e-mail and other
forms of feedback. They've been trying to address concerns of alumni for the
need for upgradation of skills.

So, their customised model offers tailor-made material, study guides,
activities and discussions formed around existing material -- textbooks,
CD-ROM resources, or tutorials. Online interactions and discussions occupy
about half the students' time, with predetermined content filling the other
half.

There are other solutions, like eCollege (an e-learning software and
services provider). Suggests the IIMB team: "Technology has created a
powerful set of tools for us to use in the educational world... Based on
the experience, technology is not the limiting factor, but making inroads
into the habit of learning (is). Most of us are habituated to lecture-based
and other direct methods, and most of the assignments are group-based."

IIMB's researchers also point out that some academics and educators "are,
and will, continue to be opposed to e-learning in principle. Academics and
educators have expressed concerns regarding the perceived loss of control
over the education process that can result from the out-sourcing of
e-learning campuses and courses, and the possibility for lower-quality
learning outcomes. Some of the concerns may be genuine and need to be
addressed at an institutional level."

Meanwhile, Acharya is an intelligent tutoring system for teaching SQL.
Acharya provides an "intelligent problem-solving environment" where students
can try out solutions to SQL problems posed by the system, and get
qualitative feedback. This has been focussed on by Sandhya Bhagat, Latesh
Bhagat, Jojumon Kavalan and M Sasikumar of NCST at Navi Mumbai.

Says this team: "The essential differences of an intelligent-tutoring system
and a computer-based tutoring system are in the level and detail with which
the subject is represented and the use of a student model.
Intelligent-tutoring systems were a dormant subject during the last decade,
after a long period of significant interest among the artificial
intelligence community."

In their paper, they describe the architecture of Acharya -- using Java
servlet technology and a web-based front-end and POSTgreSQL at the back-end.
They argue: "Acharya is based on guided discovery. A student should be given
opportunities to discover things themselves, rather than being told about
them."

>From Rajasthan, we are told of Prabodh, a distributed online Hindi grammar
teaching-learning system. Prabodh is an intelligent tutoring system, which
tries to teach elementary level Hindi grammar following the principles of
pedagogy. It allows geographically-scattered expert tutors to create lessons
and exercises, based on Hindi grammar concepts, through GUIs (graphical-user
interfaces) in Hindi, which are then stored at the server. Any student or
teacher can use these sets of lessons. This experiment has been described by
Madhavi Sinha and Rekha Govil, of the Apaji Institute of Mathematics &
Applied Computer Technology.

>From Kolkata in eastern India, computer scientists and professionals are
working on 'flexible learning' models. This could bring in just the right
amount of online content, to the right learner, and at the right time.

Using this, an online learn can call up the appropriate amount and type of
learning material when it is necessary and useful for his or her work and
performance, suggest Diptendu Datta of Aunwesha Knowledge Technologies,
Chandran Mujumdar of Jadavpur University and Shymal Majumdar of the
Technical Teachers Training Institute.

They suggest separation of content from a delivery strategy. So far, they've
developed a GUI-based tool, implemented with Java Swing, that they say "may
be" used to define strategies. Currently only parts of the strategy can be
generated by this tool, they admit.

In Bangalore, Janardhanan P.S. of Hewlett Packard's Indian Software
Operations has been looking at how to generate a 'natural sounding' voice
browser.

Online learning applications, he suggests, can be deployed on voice portals
for which telephones are the access device. Telephones, after all, are more
ubiquitous, more mobile and more affordable than computers with Internet
access.

But text-to-speech conversion systems need to produce outputs resembling
human speech. "Generating natural-sounding speech from text is successful
only if the synthesiser understands the context and mood in which the
sentence is to be spoken," says Janardhanan.

So, the way out is incorporating moods of the context into VoiceXML
documents. But considerable research is needed for "modelling prosodic
parameters" for each of the moods, he says.

>From Navi Mumbai and NCST again comes a report on 'Chaatra', a student
monitoring and learner profiling system. Chaatra tries to answer how a
student's overall understanding of a subject is, whether the student lags
behind in some particular topic, if so for what possible reason, and whether
some modification in the course needs to be carried out. It also shows
whether there are any significant patterns emerging on a student-by-student
basis in the class as a whole.

Researchers at IIT-Kharagpur have been working on automatic "query
refinement" for online learning. NCST in Belapur (Navi Mumbai) has come up
with Sandesh, a "response management system". To reduce the email load on a
person, , it offers an intelligent system that tries to understand the
content of an e-mail, and try to find a response for it. If a suitable
response is not found, the mail may be directed to the person concerned.

With so much happening in the field, there seems to be scope for potential.
But is there enough space for an exchange of ideas to happen in such a way
that the best workable ideas get into full bloom? (ENDS)

- posted by sankarshan @ 11/15/2003 06:37:00 PM