CHENNAI: Government school students will soon have better digital assessments and learning experiences, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) and data science. The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Madras has teamed up with the state school education department for this, and to turn the department’s digital learning platform - Education Management Information System (EMIS) - into an assessment-focussed system.
The learning management system built by researchers will be deployed in newly-built high-tech labs in 6,000 government schools to improve the quality of learning for 90 lakh students, said a statement issued by the institute.
Based on the education department’s recent taxonomy-based content mapping, IIT-Madras will build wide range of tools for assessment creation, and performance evaluation including fraud detection, and dashboards to monitor learning progression, as well as school and district-level monitoring. The entire initiative will be executed in three phases. The first will focus on content management for educational material and assessment, the second will work towards delivery and feedback for educational material and assessment and the last will lay emphasis on data analytics, dashboards, and reporting systems.
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. “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 useful tools that run on this medium,” said Sudarsanam.
The objective of this collaboration was provide a richer learning experience to the student and teaching community of Tamil Nadu, one which is enabled by the latest digital innovation in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies.
K Nanthakumar, 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 personalised learning pathways and targeted improvement in teaching and learning practices a possibility for students and teachers, he added.