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Vasistha - An Instruction Delivery Framework for Online Learning

The Vasistha project aims to provide a framework for course designers to structure an online course for effective online learning. The whole process of course design can really be split into two broad tasks - Instruction Design, or content design, and Instruction Delivery. While the former aims at developing content suitable for online usage, and at designing effective content, the latter aims at providing this content to the student. Visit Vasistha for more details.

Acharya - An Intelligent Tutoring System for SQL

Acharya is an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) targeted at teaching SQL. Its primary components are: Traditional course material on SQL organized to exploit ITS technology and an intelligent problem solving environment where a student receives a concept based diagnosis of his/her solution to the problem posed by the system. The course material of Acharya has been logically arranged based on a concept map of the domain. For each concept, Acharya records pre requisite concepts, reading material, examples and exercises. Exercises invoke the problem solving environment.

In problem-solving environment of Acharya, user is provided with description of tables and a problem to be solved by writing suitable SQL query. His/her answer is then compared with the correct solution using various techniques to find the conceptual mistakes if any. If the user's answer contains any conceptual error, the system will identify and display the error and suggest the user to read the course material associated with that concept. Visit Acharya for more details.

Marathi Tutor

Marathi Tutor is web-based constructive learning environment for teaching spoken or conversational Marathi. English is used as a supporting language of instruction. In addition to teaching the language, the system also guides the flow of the entire course to the student. The system aims to enable the user to read/understand newspapers, converse at public places (restricted domain), etc in Marathi. A number of pedagogical ideas are incorporated in the system keeping in mind challenges of retaining motivation, attention and focus for a typical e-learner. Though right now we are restricting the target language to Marathi, the system can be easily extended and adapted to teach other Indian languages. The data model is designed and structured in a generic fashion so that it can represent data of other languages. .Visit Marathi Tutor for more details

Parikshak
  • Parikshak - A system for testing problem solving skills through programming - Parikshak is a testing system, which provides a restricted environment for students to test their program. Students log on to Parikshak, enter code and submit for grading. Parikshak then tests the program; gives back the grading status to the student. It also keeps records of student submissions and their performance.
  • Converting Parikshak into a Web service-oriented architecture - In this project, we are investigating how well Web services meet the interoperability requirements by transforming a real example of Parikshak system into a program grading Web services framework using the open source gSOAP toolkit and providing standard Web service interfaces for seamless integration to other applications.
  • Online assignment submission Interface - Online assignment submission inteface is being integrated with the moodle LMS and it allow students to submit their code online to the grader, which then tests the code and displays the grading status back to the student. Student can also check their assignment submission status online.
Vyasa - A Generative Question Authoring System

Vyasa is an authoring system for generative questions. The system allows a teacher to create generative questions by providing a high level specification of the question. A generative question is specified using a template given by the teacher. This approach enhances the power of on-line and question-banking systems, to ensure reliable and secure tests. Each time the system is asked for an instance of such a question, it would give a different instance.

Vyasa currently supports quantitative type generative questions based on linear equations, ratios, number series, alphabet series, and mixtures. Vyasa also supports questions on data structures such as binary trees. The screen shot for quantitative type of questions is as shown below. Visit Vyasa for more details.

Program Comprehension

We are developing a framework and working package to generate questions on program comprehension. A generative testing system stores the general structure of a question (a template or an underlying structure) and has a mechanism to generate instances of the question, rather than storing the question explicitly. Potentially an infinite number of question instances can be generated from these general structures. This system will be an extension to our generative testing system, Vyasa . Program comprehension questions generally contain a code snippet as the stem and the output of the program as answers. The system will be used to generate questions on program comprehension by supporting some of the basic programming constructs that are common to most of the programming languages. These constructs include various operators, order of evaluation of operators, conditional statements and looping statements. Currently we have restricted our focus to C language. However the system is designed in a generic fashion so that it can be extended to support few other languages.

Pedagogy-oriented Content Markup Language

Pedagogy-oriented Content Markup Language (PCML) is a markup language for creating content by the teacher. This language can be used as a framework for organization of content (i.e. course, lesson, module etc). The main advantage of using such a markup language is that it will give the teacher the freedom to capture the learning information in an intuitive format. This language aims to separate the area concern of a teacher and a content developer, thus allowing both the teacher and the content developer to work separately and efficiently.

We have developed a prototype for showing its relevance in educational domain. The prototype also includes a converter to convert the content into different LMS or CMS. The purpose of the converter is to automate conversion of the content to the format of a specific CMS. Currently, we have developed a converter for Vasistha (in-house Instruction Delivery Framework). Development of converter for Drupal is in progress.Visit Pedagogy-oriented Markup Language for more details.

Content Design

In an attempt to offer our PGDST course online, the course contents have been coverted to online format. Spanning across 80 hours, the content includes lecture slides, video snippets for each topic, audio support (for bandwidth constrained users), code segments, etc. Organised under the Vasistha framework, the course incorporates a number of pedagogical innovations

Vidyakash e-learning Framework

Vidyakash e-learning framework is a unique online framework to create content, deliver content, evaluate and monitor student progress, give personalized instruction to each student. This framework also supports interaction between teachers and students for qualitative feedback. This unique framework is built on an open source learning management system MOODLE (http://www.moodle.org) and incorporates our inhouse systems like an instruction delivery framework ( Vasistha ), online testing system ( Veda ), intelligent tutoring system ( Acharya ) and program testing system ( Parikshak ). Currently we are using Vidyakash e-learning framework to offer one of our diploma course PGDST , in an online format.

Sandesh - An Automatic Email Response System

Sandesh is an automatic email response system which is useful in an online learning environment. The system acts as a middleman between the faculty and the students. All the queries posed by the students to the faculty is intercepted by Sandesh, which checks its repository to see if the same or similar query has been asked earlier and if a response to it is already available. If yes, then Sandesh forwards the corresponding response to the student; else it forwards the mail to the faculty. The response from the faculty is also intercepted by Sandesh so that it can update its repository. Thus, the burden on the faculty is reduced considerably for he does not have to respond to the same query several times, thanks to Sandesh which presents the faculty mostly with unique queries for answering. Sandesh is not restricted to e-learning environment; it can also be useful for scenarios like help desk, customer support centre, enquiry services, etc.

Chaatra - A Student Monitoring and Feedback system

Chaatra is aimed at analysing the student data (performance and access profile), developing learner profiles to generate qualitative instructional feedback to students and faculty.

CARES - Course Administration Registration Evaluation System

CARES is a database system currently used for maintaining PGDST and FPGDST student records. Apart from student personal details it keeps records of their evaluations and fees related details. It also, provides feedback analysis interface which is useful to generate graphical representation of comparative analysis of PGDST centers based on the feedback given by PGDST students after every Mid-Module and End-Module quiz.

Data Analysis Tool

At enables to look for certain trends/dependencies in the given formatted text data or database. This tool can be used to study the effect of one or more variables on the target field (response). It makes use of certain statistical techniques and data mining algorithms to find trends/dependencies.

Veda - An Online Testing and Question Banking System

Veda is an online testing and question banking system. The system allows a teacher to create tests in any domain. These tests can be administered to a large number of students. The system enables frequent and effective evaluation of students, and also provides feedback about the test to the staff in terms of a statistical analysis of questions.

The major strengths of this work are its strong security aspects, and support for statistical analysis of questions. Veda has a support for different kind of questions like multiple choice, match the following, true/false, etc. The design is done in such a manner that adding new question types will be easier. Other major features that Veda supports include randomisation of questions and choices, question bank management, quiz management, and test administration. Veda works on a client-server technology. Visit Veda for more details.

Descriptive Examination System

Descriptive Examination System (DES), an online tool that tackles your test requirements with friendly interfaces. It is mainly focused on managing university/school type exams containing descriptive questions or a mix of descriptive and objective type questions. Various exam related tasks such as paper pattern creation and reuse, question paper creation, conducting the exam, evaluation of the answer sheets are made easy and online using the tool. The framework offers a number of benefits such as reuse of resources, reduced time, effort and paper work and reduction in human errors during evaluation, even though the assessment of answers is done manually.

The system allows reuse of paper patterns, maintaining a question bank, creating/managing question papers using a particular pattern and the question bank. Student can appear for the exam online and the examiners can also evaluate the answer sheets of various students online (manually), using various evaluation strategies like question-wise (for each student) and student-wise (for each paper). Visit Descriptive Examination System for more details.

Quiz OMR

Optical Mark Reader (OMR) Quiz provides online support for managing and evaluating objective-type assessments which are conducted offline using OMR sheets. OMR Quiz has features provided by online testing tools like question banking, automatic result evaluation, result analysis, result publication etc. The tool has been developed as an extension to popular Learning Management System Moodle's "Quiz" module, and is available from the moodle site as a plug in. Visit “Quiz OMR” for more details.