IIT Madras researchers and Tamil Nadu’s Department of School Education join hands to make digital assessments and learning experience of school students better
Researchers will build a learning management system which will be deployed in newly built high-tech labs in 6,000 Government schools to improve the quality of learning for 90 lakh students
CHENNAI : Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) researchers and Tamil Nadu’s Department of School Education have collaborated to provide a richer learning experience to the school students by improvising and updating the existing digital learning platform to an Assessment focused Learning Management System.
Currently, the classroom education of Tamil Nadu’s school students is supplemented through a digital learning platform i.e. Education Management Information System. IIT Madras researchers will use their AI and data science expertise to come up with ways to improve the way assessments are conducted and framework for dissemination of educational material.
Researchers will build on the education department’s recent efforts of a taxonomy based content mapping to build a wide range of tools. These include assessment creation, performance evaluation including fraud detection, and various dashboards to monitor the learning progression of students, as well as school and district-level monitoring.
This initiative will be led by faculty, students, project associates and channel partners of the Robert Bosch Centre of Data Science and AI, a centre housed at IIT Madras with a vision to expand and further the research, education and outreach activities in the areas of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.
Education is one of the key areas of research at RBCDSAI and the centre is currently pursuing a study that aims to determine successful delivery methods for ICT in education to improve learning outcomes.
Dr Nandan Sudarsanam, Associate Professor at the Department of Management Studies and a core member of the Robert Bosch Center for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBCDSAI) is the Principal Investigator of this collaborative effort from the IIT Madras’s side.
Highlighting the importance of this project, he said “The digital medium can allow us to customize content and monitor progress in ways that would otherwise be unimaginable. We seek to improve the quality of education by building a data-driven framework and a set of useful tools that run on this medium.”
The entire initiative will be executed in three phases. The first phase will focus on content management for Educational material and Assessment, the second phase will work towards on delivery and feedback for educational material and assessment and the third phase will lay emphasis on data Analytics, Dashboards and Reporting system.
Thiru K. Nanthakumar (IAS), Commissioner, Department of School Education of Tamil Nadu commented, “The State is moving towards a competency-based teaching and learning model. Our partnership with IIT-Madras is a critical step towards making this a reality for all Government and Government-aided school students. Through this initiative, we hope to make personalized learning pathways and targeted improvement in teaching and learning practices a possibility for students and teachers. This initiative will also be made completely open for students & teachers in private schools.”
The purpose of this collaboration is to provide the student and teacher community of Tamil Nadu with a richer learning experience, one which is enabled by the latest digital innovation in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies.
AI can power the education sector by providing 24/7 universal education, personalized mentoring to students depending on their weak areas, assisting the administration in grading papers, assessing learning patterns etc.