Telangana: AI to aid Govt schools in formative assessments

Hyderabad: Select Government school complexes (a cluster of high school, middle and primary schools) in the State may soon get to use some artificial intelligence based tools that will automate a few of the time and resources consuming processes like formative assessments, marking attendance, logging mid-day meals data among others. They will even be put to use to teach English and later other languages too.

These artificial intelligence-based tools will be implemented in select school complexes in Moinabad as a pilot project through the Prof Raj Centre at IIIT-H, which is working to create artificial technologies and technology solutions for the grassroots. A team from the IIIT-H had initial meetings with select school complex head masters, resource persons and officials of the Education Department to understand problems at the grass-root level.

“We plan to meet the concerned people once again and make specific plans for the technology interventions possible. We want to keep the technologies ready for the coming academic year. These will be short term projects of three to six months that aim to address the issues at the earliest,” said Ramesh Loganathan, Co-Innvation Professor at IIIT-H.

“We observed that a lot of manual work is involved in the data collection and also for feeding the same into the education portal. This data is important but is time consuming. Our idea is to see how artificial intelligence based cameras, speech recognition technologies and other tools can be used for marking the attendance, midday meals and other activities. For this, we will rope in startups or technology companies that have relevant technologies already. We will build some technologies that are in research,” he said.

The New Education Policy stipulates formative assessment of students. For this, teachers need to evaluate every class every week and make a report of who all understood the concept and who did not. “Experienced teachers can assess who is grasping the content and who is not by observing students’ body language, expressions, attentiveness and the kind of questions they ask in the class. We will use an AI-based camera system and model it to assess the students on these attributes. It can generate a report which the teachers can use to plan additional support to the students who are graded low. The teacher can validate the recommendations and the algorithm will learn from that. The same can also be used for marking attendance,” explained Loganathan.

“We have a technology for teaching spoken languages. So, that is something we have already started building. We are wiring it to the high school curriculum. For each lesson in English, there will be a set of sentences the system will speak and then the class or the individual students will repeat. The system will suggest corrections based on how students perform. The same can be used for other languages also,” he said about the pilot that is planned to put technology to use for solving problems at the ground level.

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