(An idea of making classroom learning more
interesting, efficient, rewarding, challenging and competitive for students)
Background:
Research shows that
classroom participation is an important aspect towards interactively learning
the academic topics. But students often drop out classes, or postpone learning
to the few days before exam, which is an unhealthy practice. If every student
learns and clarifies the concepts within the class itself, it saves a lot of home
study, and makes the course efficient for the student, and the teacher as well.
But what prevents to achieve this ideal scenario? Just the lack of motivation,
or too much lethargy to be interactive in the class, or just the typical
student mindset to drop off lectures.
Traditional education
targets on periodic evaluation of learning. Accordingly we have semesters or
quarterly examinations in our universities. However, such periodic evaluations
does not always correspond to the strategic checkpoint of learning. Often some
portions of learning are left out or speedily completed to meet examination
deadlines. Also unexpected interruption in academic schedule due to various
other issues keeps on hampering the ideal evaluation scenario.
Again, proper one-to-one
sessions are growing scarce in today’s education. It always happens that a few
motivated group of students benefits from the class. But a large section of
backbenchers remain mute due to shyness, short of understanding, lack of
confidence, and similar reasons. Students hardly revise the past leanings
before a class, and the gap between class progress and students' progress keep
on increasing. The match of pace between the progress of two can result in an
effective education system.
This proposal attempts to
address a remedy to these shortcomings of the traditional education system.
Proposal:
Besides the periodic
exams, there should be intermittent evaluations, and random evaluations, that
should enhance the learning of the students. But it is hardly possible for the
learning enabler to evaluate each participant in every class. Further, it has
to be considered that such evaluations should not create pressure upon the
students. Best approach should be a system where each student proactively
participates in the evaluation out of self-motivation. Such system would
feature micro-management in student progress and performance in place of the
macro-management that is currently practiced.
The motivation to earn
some discount at food joints, some internet or mobile recharge, or some other
cool merchandise only at the small effort of being attentive at class can be
viral, if properly marketed. Short term goals are easier to compete and
achieve. Further, an effective bridge between classroom and canteen can bring the
enthusiasm and motivation of the off-hours into the classroom itself.
Accordingly, a mechanism
of smart-education is proposed, that features better self-motivated
participation, micro evaluation, individual learning progress indication,
earning with a friendly yet competitive mindset, and much more. Such an
implementation can be expected to bring on a drastic change in the field of
learning and education.
Mechanism:
This proposal involves a
mobile application offering a student engagement platform depending upon the
academic curriculum. A high school or graduate school lecture, typically of two
hours length, is broken down into small sessions of about 10 minutes, followed
by a challenge time of 1 minute. Every student will be informed via Bluemix Alert
Notification of the application in their smart-phone, the details of the
upcoming session and the list of incentives that can be gained in this session.
While entering the classroom, each student would login to this app using their
smart-phone. A voice recorder in the class (or with the lecturer) would record
the lecture; Bluemix Speech to Text service would convert the last 10 minutes
lecture into written form. Bluemix Natural Language Classifier would extract
the topic of discussion from a predefined catalog.
This 10 minutes
discussion, along with topics and keywords highlighted appears in the
smart-phones which have apps actively logged in to the course/ session. Bluemix
Relationship Extraction would be used to extract Named Entities or Keywords,
and Bluemix Concept Insights might be optionally used to link the keywords to
external links.
Either Bluemix dialog
service, or Watson Engagement Adviser, would be used to generate quite a bunch
of questions upon the context of the last 10 minutes lecture only. The context
of the lecture would belong to the identified topic of discussion from the
catalog, and it can be expanded, if necessary, using Concept Expansion service
of Bluemix Platform. The questions, random and different for each student,
would appear in their respective smart-phone using the IBM Push Notification
service. The students would get a window of 1 minute to answer the same. Within
this span, an early answer would receive more credits. So ideally, for a
lecture of 2 hours, there will be 12 such question sessions, which would be
initiated by the lecturer/course coordinator, and terminate automatically after
1 minute.
An end of session
evaluation featuring multiple questions would be prompted to each participant
as the lecturer marks the completion of the class. Time span can be of 1 minute
only where the students would have to answer as many questions as they can.
Answers might be of textual kind instead of multiple-choice type.
The answers are credited
in two ways. First comes accuracy of the answer. Second is the time required to
submit the answer. If the answer is of textual kind, accuracy can be determined
using Retrieve and Rank service of Bluemix platform. The credit points would
accumulate for every student, and can be exchanged for some monetary benefit
like mobile recharge or cafeteria payment. However, this broadly depends upon
university involvement in bearing the cost, or availability of public sponsors.
Another challenge remains,
biometric identification of a student / participant and prevention of
impersonation in the class. This can be addressed by providing the application
a random text during login, which the student would require to read out to the
application via smart-phone microphone. The voice record can be used by Bluemix
Tone Analyzer to identify the person from a previously build database. Bluemix
Visual Recognition or Alchemy Vision can assist this security verification by a
live photo of the participant. Bluemix Geo-spatial Analytics can be used to
detect if a participant leaves the classroom, and would auto log out his/her
session, which would require re-validation to log in.
Once a lecture is over,
Bluemix Text to Speech service would thank all the participants, and announce
the top three credit scorers of the session to everyone’s' smart-phone. Also,
Bluemix Presence Insight service would come into play to present a summary of
the student responsiveness to the lecturer / course coordinator. This report
can be a source of improvements necessary for the lecturer as well. Students
often miss out the links and pointers to external resources mentioned by the
lecturer, and later they keep pondering upon some term the teacher might have
mentioned. It can be useful if a Bluemix Dialog Service can be trained to
address all possible queries of the students via this application.
The App can be developed
using Bluemix services like Mobile Application Content Manager and Mobile
Client Access. The Monitoring and Analytics service, or Mobile Quality
Assurance service can be used at a later phase for the App effectiveness. Any
cloud data store service from Bluemix has to be used to store necessary
information for the App.
Benefits:
For the Students:
An option of incentive
based learning would create more enthusiasm to attend a class. Students would
prefer not to miss a session if possible.
A competitive edge in
daily learning with interactive QA is better than a hour long flat monotonous
session. In a competition, people tend to extend their effort to additional
levels.
Frequent questions and
questions related to last few minutes discussion only would make students
concentrate more in class, and concentrate on the portion being taught as
subsequent questions are expected from the recently taught sections only.
Both effective learning
and short term understanding are evaluated for each student in such a system.
An effective mix of
multiple-choice and textual answers would expose the creative, analytical,
reasoning, and summarizing skills of a student.
For the Faculty:
Better participation and
concentration from students in the class.
Possibility to track own
performance in delivering lecture in the class.
Activities:
For the Students:
1. Install the App in
their smart-phone.
2. Register in the App
with credentials.
3. Follow notifications
from the App for upcoming classes.
4. Once settled down in
the class, login to a session by biometric validation.
5. Attend the class.
6. At every challenge
interval, answer the question that popped-up in the smart-phone.
7. Get credit points.
8. Exchange credit points
with some benefits depending on university planning.
9. Review the class
summary if necessary from the App.
For the Faculty:
1. Start the App before
starting the lecture.
2. Plan for a logical
break in the lecture every 10 minutes.
3. Indicate the start of
break, that is the Challenge Interval to the App.
4. Resume the lecture when
end of Challenge Interval is indicated by the smart-phone.
5. Indicate the end of
session to the App.
IBM Bluemix Services:
·
IBM Alert Notification
·
Speech to Text
·
Relationship Extraction
·
Concept Insights
·
Natural Language Classifier
·
Dialog
·
Watson Engagement Adviser
·
Concept Expansion
·
IBM Push Notification
·
Retrieve and Rank
·
Tone Analyzer
·
Visual Recognition
·
Alchemy Vision
·
Geo-spatial Analytics
·
Text to Speech
·
Presence Insights
·
Mobile Application Content Manager
·
Mobile Client Access
·
Monitoring and Analytics
·
Mobile Quality Assurance
