Chennai: Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT Madras) researchers and Tamil Nadu’s Department of School Education have started a collaboration on Monday to provide a richer learning experience to school students by improvising and updating the existing digital learning platform to an assessment-focused Learning Management System. As a part of this initiative, researchers will develop a Learning Management System, which will be deployed in newly built high-tech labs in 6,000 government schools.
Currently, the classroom education of Tamil Nadu’s school students is provided with a digital learning platform called 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 to improve the framework for the dissemination of educational material.
Researchers will build on the education department’s recent efforts of a taxonomy-based content mapping system 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.
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 customise 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 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 improving the delivery and feedback mechanism for educational material and assessment and the third phase will lay emphasis on Data Analytics, Dashboards and reporting system.
The Commissioner of the Department of School Education of Tamil Nadu K Nanthakumar said, "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 personalised 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 and teachers in private schools."
