IN A WORLD WHERE THOSE WHO CAN'T TEACH, I.T. CAN by 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 digitally-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? ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
