Virtual Education

Education

Chhattisgarh Infotech and Biotech Promotion Society (CHi PS) Government of Chhattisgarh has initiated project Virtual Education with funding support from MEITY, Government of India. The project envisages leveraging technology to improve student-learning outcomes, assist teachers through ICT enabled classrooms, build teacher capacity using online and offline platforms and support the school-District-State administration with relevant, accurate and timely data to inform policy decisions.

The project offers to set up a learning management system which will provide content mapped with the state syllabus to be used by teachers and students. The project is coupled with ICT at schools scheme and will primarily focus on secondary and higher secondary schools. The Learning Management System will further be extended to colleges, vocational institutes and ITIs.

Virtual Education

The project will aim to achieve the following:-

Increase learning outcomes in secondary and higher secondary schools through ICT enabled interventions and further extend functionalities for colleges, vocational institutions, ITIs.
Build scalable models for teacher training in both offline and online formats
Build and deploy an online and offline learning platform to provide access to digital teaching-learning material, facilitate integration for 3rd party applications and create a one stop shop for all education related needs of Chhattisgarh.
Present a Chhattisgarh Report Card through an annual computer based diagnostic test for select schools-grades-subjects across all Districts in Chhattisgarh.
Provide digital content (Create, curate or license e-content) mapped to the State curriculum through an online learning platform.
Creating a culture of Data driven decision making by looking at measurable parameters such as student learning levels, time logged, regular assessments, etc; provide dashboards at all levels of administration.
Set up a Centre of Excellence which will own and operate the learning platform and scale the project through online and offline formats.
Pilot and scale EdTech innovations through the Centre of Excellence.
Design future interventions and policy based on relevant, accurate and timely data provided through the Learning Management System.
Design for scale: Build, test and iterate different Hardware, Software and ICT Deployment models and present respective outcomes.

The project is taking up a 3 pronged approach to achieve the above stated objectives.

A. The project will launch Learning Management System with subjects mapped to Chhattisgarh State curriculum for classes 6-12.

B. The platform will also be made available to 1900 Schools across 27 Districts in the State.

C. A Centre of Excellence will be set up by CHiPS for the long term sustenance and future scale up of the project. The CoE will have representatives of all the Education Departments of Government of Chhattisgarh and will also become the mechanism for formalising project partnerships.

A. The Learning Management System (LMS)

The LMS will provide e-learning solutions in schools, colleges and vocational institutions both offline and online and will be blended with the traditional teaching and learning methodologies to enrich classroom interaction. It will host e-content mapped to state curriculum and extracurricular courses accessible to learners for free of cost from anywhere. The portal will provide an integration platform for third party vendors to offer their educational services and content. It will also have social networking features to meet the demands of contemporary digital lifestyle. The larger vision of the project is to create a national portal for education, emerging as a single point source for all education related content and services by both public and private players.

Salient features of the Learning Platform are:-

Hosting e-content mapped to state curriculum and making it available to all the stakeholders in both offline and online mode.
Facilitating exemplary teachers in creating virtual course content and hosting to Learning Platform for public at large.
Facilitating students to take virtual remedial classes, adaptive assessments and quizzes.
Facilitating teachers in the ICT enabled classroom to utilize learning platform for teaching.
Facilitate teachers in increasing their subject knowledge and teaching skills with Teacher Learning Centre
Tracking student learning outcomes
Facilitating Education department and concerned authorities in data driven decision making by providing dashboards to access per student/teacher/school LMS usage data.
Integration services for 3rd party vendors to offer their educational content and services.

B. Interventions at 1,246 School

The intervention in the 1,246 schools will adopt two different approaches for enhancing learning outcomes:-

Personalized Learning: We are setting a computer lab with 25 laptops/ Chromebooks connected to a local LMS server hosting e-content mapped to state curriculum. Students can login to their personalized dashboards to access subject courses, give assessments and get immediate feedback from the learning platform. This methodology is enabling one-to-one learning where machine/platform acts as a virtual teacher giving personalized dashboards, tells course progress, takes assessments and give immediate feedback on assessment results.

ICT enabled Classrooms: A teacher uses an ICT enabled classroom setup which includes a projector, teacher laptop, student response system (clickers) and the LMS platform to access e-content & teaching tools. We are provisioning 4 such smart classrooms, one for every grade from 9th – 12th at every 1,246 schools under ICT budget. This methodology is enabling one-to-many learning where a teacher is empowered with teaching tools and e-content to enrich her teaching session.

C. Centre of Excellence (CoE)

The CoE will own the learning platform and will drive the online and offline adoption through various initiatives. The CoE will undertake the following activities and will be set up to ensure the long term sustenance of the project: