NIC’s Cricket as an Assessment Tool makes e-learning ‘fun every day’

National Informatics Centre (NIC) is not only supporting the state governments to adopt e-learning initiatives for continuity of academic curriculum for children amid coronavirus outbreak, but also making online classes more engrossing for kids.

NIC has developed a tool, Cricket as an Assessment Tool (CAAT), which uses gamification for teaching key subjects in school curriculum in Chhattisgarh. It not only makes students happy while studying but also attracts them to learn new things through innovative ways. A quiz is conducted in the form of a cricket match with the correctness of given answer being displayed in the form of assertive animation for a four, six or a wicket. There is multiplayer option wherein students can form teams and select their core subject to build a user profile.

NIC created academic cycle management system named “पढ़ाईतुहंरदुआर” which includes a wide range of modules such as online textbook delivery, video lectures, other teaching learning material (TLM) and reference material (videos, images, audios, PDFs), online classes, assignments, question bank, homework management and doubt clearance. Within a month of its launch, 20.15 lakh students and 1.62 lakh teachers have registered in the system voluntarily.

NIC says the tool is becoming more and more popular among the school children as they found it entertaining for their regular studies.

Notably, Covid19 has resulted in global lockdown of educational institutions, bringing the social life and learning of 72 per cent of the world’s student population to a virtual standstill.

The coronavirus outbreak has left staggering impact across all verticals of education sector including learning, daily nutrition, assessment having long lasting economic and social implications. Government of India is promoting e-learning initiatives by providing digital access to new and existing educational resources for students, teachers and professionals. A thrust is being given on using alternate channels to ensure the uninterrupted academic curriculum for children.

Similarly, NIC has provided e-governance solutions to Rajasthan as well. NIC has developed integrated ‘ShalaDarpan’ (http://rajshaladarpan.nic.in) that provides a coherent enterprise resource planning solution to Rajasthan’s state education department. The ShalaDarpan system handles online records of over 80 lakh students, over 4.15 lakh teachers/staff details of 65,000 government schools and provides operational support for effective decision making to education department administrators, head of schools, teachers, students and common citizens. It provides end to end solution starting from resource planning to daily operations and staff rationalisation.

In West Bengal, model assignments, model Q&A have been framed for all classes and made available in five languages (Bengali, English, Hindi, Urdu and Santhali) in BanglarShiksha portal (https://banglarshiksha.gov.in/) developed by NIC. It holds single data repository of 64,000 schools under grant in aid system, 1.4 crore students and 4.1 lakh teachers in West Bengal.

The portal facilitates live classroom through two TV channels daily with live phone-in facility and can be viewed offline with other e-learning content.

To help school children check the status of their scholarship and access e-learning content, NIC has created mShikshaMitra App (http://educationportal.mp.gov.in/) for Madhya Pradesh government. It has over five lakh downloads on Google Playstore. Teachers can report student enrolment details and access personal office records like service book, transfer orders, pay slip. Over 90,000 geo-tagged and geo-fenced photographs of school inspections are recorded every month in Madhya Pradesh using the camera-assistive GPS on smart-phones.

Indian school education system is one of the largest in the world comprising of over 1.5 million schools, over 9 million teachers and more than 26 million students. NIC has developed a robust, real time and a credible platform in the form of “Unified District Information system for Education” (http://udiseplus.gov.in/), having complete information regarding school profile, physical facilities/equipment, teaching/non-teaching staff, enrollment, incentives, results, financials and safety standards. All the schools are mapped on School GIS (https://schoolgis.nic.in/), which allows the department to locate, identify, analyse, and rationalise the distribution of schools across the various parts of the country. To ensure an efficient search of schools based on multiple parameters, NIC has created “Know Your School”, an online directory that allows to search school with linking to school report card.

The informatics centre also facilitated an online exam for students of classes 6th to 10th in Tiruvannamalai district, Tamil Nadu which was attended by 20,000 students out of total 30,000 registered ones in two rounds.

An NIC official says that India can be at the forefront of dynamic technological disruptions in education sector by becoming a digital education hub in the world. Technology will play an important role in the expansive growth of Indian education sector. Learning through AI and ML can be used for creating insights driven personalised learning curves for each student. Data analytics can be used for evidence-based decisions and policy making. Big data analytics of Unified District Information System for Education (UDISE+) data can determine the type of policy interventions needed for the school education system by assisting in corroboration of policies. AI solutions with the help of powerful libraries, including yet not limited to natural language recognition, language translation and game theory, can enable us to create avatars that simulate the behavior of a virtual teacher for students or a digital assistant for teachers.