IIT-M, govt join hands to develop assessment learning mgmt system

CHENNAI: Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-Madras) researchers and Tamil Nadu’s School Education Department have collaborated 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.

Currently, the classroom education of Tamil Nadu’s school students is supplemented through a digital learning platform -- Education Management Information System (EMIS).

IIT-Madras researchers will use their AI and data science expertise to come up with ways to improve the way assessments are conducted and the framework for the dissemination of educational material.

Researchers will build on the education department’s recent efforts of 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, and IIT-Madras release on Monday said here.

This initiative will be led by faculty, students, project associates, and channel partners of the Robert Bosch Centre of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (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 AI.

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) 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,”

he added.

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 delivery and feedback for educational material and assessment and the third phase will lay emphasis on data Analytics, Dashboards, and Reporting system.

K Nanthakumar, Commissioner, Department of School Education of Tamil Nadu commented, "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."

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 AI and Machine Learning technologies, he said.