In August when the academic year took off at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Kottayam, (IIIT-Kottayam), the institute saw an open-source future for learning.
The unprecedented disruption caused by the COVID-19 outbreak had already forced the education sector to embrace technology. But in the absence of robust connectivity, questions on the efficacy of remote learning continued to linger.
So, instead of the usual re-purposing of the work-based platforms such as Zoom or Google Meet, the Centrally funded institution opted to build a customised application using Moodle plugins — OSOC-P — that supports the rich ecosystem of classroom learning.
This new learning management system, developed with the active support of its faculty members and technical support staff, is now reaping rich dividends to the institution, besides bringing in laurels from even the Union Ministry of Education.
“IIIT-Kottayam has innovated an #OpenSourcePlatform for the Teaching & Learning Process (OSOC-P). The platform is capable of delivering online classes & conducts all virtual activities like online classes, content sharing, etc. for registered users. Great work team!”, Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, Union Minister of Education, recently wrote on his official social media page.
According to M. Radhakrishnan, Registrar, IIIT-Kotttayam, the platform is capable of handling requests by multiple students and faculty members at the same time. It can also be used for organising virtual programming labs under which students are directly provided a code editor to write their program and it will be passed towards multiple test cases.
“Each course maintains a separate dashboard containing its own announcements and lecture notes and is connected to an own meeting room. The faculty members can pose questions to the class through polls and take attendance while the sessions can be recorded and students can access those recordings till the end of that course,” Ebin Deni Raj, a faculty member of CSE Department explained.
Online exams
It also enables the conduct of online examinations through multiple-choice questions and students can scan and upload the answer scripts as a single document. Plagiarised content is flagged instantly .The grade for assignments and the report for courses too can be generated through the platform.
“Since the faculty members can regulate the volume of data transmission by reducing the video resolution, the system works efficiently even in case of a fall in Internet speed,” added Dr. Radhakrishnan.
Having achieved cent percent attendance of students — a rare feat in the age of online learning, IIIT-Kottayam now seeks to help other institutions in the region to adapt to virtual learning by designing and sharing similar customised open-source platforms.