OPEN ACCESS Engineering Leaders Conference 2014 Leveraging digital platforms for teaching and learning processes Sudheer Reddy Kola 1, Kantha Reddy Muthangi 2 1 Consultant 2 Indo US Collaboration for Engineering Education ABSTRACT Employability remains a serious concern in India, with the country producing about 1.5 million engineers each year from over 3200 institutions. Surveys and analysis reports from several industries and apex bodies have pointed out the talent shortage and presented that only 30 35% of them are employable in Industry sector. In order to enhance the employability skills and competencies of engineering students in a large scale, a Learning Management System (LMS), has been adopted. The digital collaboration platform has been the catalyst for transforming the education world. This paper presents the need for a digital collaboration framework that promote employability skills (technical, soft and problem solving) required for engineering students to become global professionals by effectively leveraging the technology. The proposed digital platform has been deployed on Moodle, an open source web LMS. The goal of this framework is to create an online learning collaboration platform that help teachers in getting the learning repositories, including assessments, case studies, assignments up on the learning portal for students and to facilitate the traditional classroom activities viz., participation, assignments, events calendar, time lines, instructions, resources, discussions, quizzes and grading. Leveraging digital infrastructure has led to a higher grade of dissemination, linked to traditional classroom teaching. Successively, this model has facilitated the learning fraternity to have broader, wider, easier and anytime, anywhere access to knowledge repository. The effective teaching and learning mechanisms have been greatly influence by the digital infrastructure. Keywords: Learning management system, assessment, education, moodle, courseware, industry, academia, campus connect http://dx.doi.org/ 10.5339/qproc.2015.elc2014.41 ª 2015 Kola, Muthangi, licensee Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license CC BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Cite this article as: Kola SR, Muthangi KR. Leveraging digital platforms for teaching and learning processes, QScience Proceedings (Engineering Leaders Conference 2014) 2015:41 http://dx.doi.org/10.5339/qproc.2015.elc2014.41
Page 2 of 7 I. INTRODUCTION Digital collaboration platforms are playing a vital role in today s teaching-learning process. These e- learning platforms provides flexibility to users (both learners and enablers) having an interactive media that encompasses several types of content including, audio, video, animation, text, image and web resources and documents. Moodle (Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) 1 is an open source web based software package designed to support e-learning and help educators in getting the learning resources and assessments on a website for students, and to facilitate the management of typical classroom activities viz., attendance and participation, assignments, events calendar, time lines, instructions, resources, activities, interactive learning, class discussions, quizzes and grading. Moodle has emerged as most preferred Learning Management Systems (LMS) not only because it is freeware, but also because of, (i) ease of installation, (ii) easy to use courseware platform, (iii) intuitive graphical user interface, and (iv) several other collaboration and activity based features viz., interactive learning center, use of multimedia (integrating audio, video, animations), polls, assessments, discussion forum, online chat, wiki, email system, appointments schedule, authentication and security. In this paper, the authors present a novel framework for digital learning and assessment platform deployed on Moodle software by the effective use of several thousands of stakeholders. II. BACKGROUND The growth of a country s economy has been influenced by the education. Over the last few years, the Indian information technology (IT) industry has grown to become the leading employer. While India has been producing a large number of engineers every year, the varying quality and quantity of is a serious concern. The remarkable growth rate of IT organizations over the past few years, inevitably translates to a perennial shortage of talent with relevant experience, compelling organizations to focus on fresh entrant graduates. UML as a pioneer in engineering education has concerned itself with the issue and launched the Indo-US Collaboration for Engineering Education (IUCEE) as one of its strategic initiatives. 2 One of the aims of IUCEE is to enhance the competencies of students at partnering engineering colleges in a consistent, scalable, effective and sustainable way. IUCEE has soon realized that if students in the college are exposed to what they get trained in industry, then they are better prepared to take on the challenges once they join the industry. IUCEE adopted a model to deal with this by reaching the students through the college faculty and leveraging the technology. This approach involves enabling college faculty members to develop the students with the aid of technology. Keeping in view all challenges, a strong set of systems and process were designed. A portal for this practice was put in place that will serve as an integrated digital platform through which IUCEE can share the knowledge artifacts. Technology is used to share the courseware and other knowledge artifacts to academic community. The initiative is driving the quality and quantity enhancement of the student by offering five different types of programs. These programs are targeted for various stakeholders such as students, college faculty members and college management to over 200 geographically diverse colleges in a consistent, predictable and effective way. The IUCEE team developed a system for deploying core processes with integrated tracking capability for end-to-end deployment and management. To reach the scale of 200þ engineering institutions, thousands of faculty and millions of students, the IUCEE has developed a digital collaboration platform 3 to deploy offerings, training programs and unified assessment framework in a consistent, scalable, effective and sustainable way for effective usage of students and college faculty. Also, it is estimated that, every year about 20-25,000 students will undergo the training programs at colleges, so there is a need to standardize the assessment process uniformly across the colleges. Hence, the team has proposed a standard framework for training and assessment by adopting Moodle. III. LITERATURE SURVEY Martín-Blas & Serrano 4 showed that an online learning community helps both educators and students to have a virtual learning environment where one can share knowledge through several supervised activities, chats and forums.
Page 3 of 7 Smith 5 suggested that a reflective analysis examines the associations between formative assessments and grades in undergraduate courses. Performance in assessments correlates to individual and weekly online assessments. Student attendance and use of assessment feedback are also essential factors that can be captured through online. Sudheer & Srinagesh 6 stated that by effectively leveraging technology and on-line learning channels, one can improve problem solving abilities of engineering students. IV. SOFTWARE AND HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS Moodle can be installed and run on Windows, Macintosh and almost all flavors of Linux operating systems on any computer that runs PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) and supports a SQL database. Moodle software is designed and developed on a LAMP platform (Linux using Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP). Moodle installation requires a minimum of 160MB free disk space to place all installable packages, files and applications. Along with this, need as much as space needed to store materials. The realistic would be 5GB minimum. A minimum of 256MB memory is required, but it is recommended to use 1GB or more. In general, Moodle can support 10 to 20 concurrent users for 1GB of RAM, but this will vary reliant on precise combination of hardware and /or software and also the type of use. V. METHODOLOGY The idea of automating assessment was piloted using one of the commercial software from a domestic leading assessment solution provider. During the pilot mode, some of the issues related to standardization, scalability, re-usability and quality of question paper were addressed. The cost of the assessment was high and the organization has born the cost for the pilot implementation for about 500 students. Since then, the organization has decided to move to open source software to address all economical and operational challenges. The Assessment portal (Figure 1) is exclusively designed for the benefit of students, college faculty members and Infosys recruits at large scale. The portal is the key resource for interactive learning, assessments for students undergoing technical, soft skills training programs at colleges and to capture online feedback from both students and faculty members. The below figure is the screenshot of the assessment portal: Figure 1. Assessment portal landing Page. For effectively managing the training offerings at partnering colleges, a robust, cost effective and uniform assessment is introduced by leveraging the technology. This technology framework is achieved high scalability with zero software cost across all colleges. User-friendly features and availability of instant online assistance helped stakeholders to reduce the training cost. The assessment portal provides users, (i) fast, easy and secure access to high quality interactive courseware and assessment tools (ii) the option to deliver the test in online form directly to students (iii) instantaneous access to results and reports in various formats and (iv) the ability to save customized tests for future use.
Page 4 of 7 The assessment portal comes with an activity-based model by combining the activities into sequences and groups that can help users via learning channels. Each course that is deployed on Moodle contains activities and resources. Activities include, assignments, quizzes, polls, forums, databases, etc. there are several other associative tools that provide blogs, messaging, and many others to build learners communities. The following are the four major features of the assessment portal (Figure 2): (i) Assessments provide students and college faculty members with a range of underpinning knowledge assessments that can be customized to suit the assessment needs. One can select an assessment that is generated randomly by the system. A sophisticated mechanism is put in place for assessments in the form of an assessment framework. Our assessment framework includes, Bloom s Taxonomy, CAMP (Conceptual, Analytical, Memory and Practice) Model, Rubrics Methodology, etc., for question bank generation, case study or assignment assessment, quiz etc. (ii) Learning Resources provide courseware, study material, video lectures and other resources relevant to units of competency and assessment. (iii) Reports provide users with a detailed report on courses, users, assessment (both high level and detailed), feedback reports in a number of formats. (iv) Online feedback can be collected from students, college faculty and other stakeholders. The feedback form is designed and published on the assessment portal to collect the course feedback, instructor feedback and feedback on other relevant topics. All four major features are shown in the figure below: Figure 2. Features of assessment portal. The designed LMS portal is also being used for faculty assessments, surveys, feedback, polls, etc. Using the LMS not only motivates college faculty members but, also to get acquainted with new technologies and provides a significant value add to the program. The developed portal has a set of roles and each role has privileges. A role is a set of permissions defined for the system that an administrator can assign to specific users in precise contexts. The roles and context combination define a specific user s ability to do a task on any page. For example, student and teacher are the key roles in the context of a course. The following matrix (Table 1) lists the key roles and its description. VI. PLANNING AND DEPLOYMENT OF ASSESSMENTS A focused activity and assessment in a short quiz allows an educator or college faculty member to design and build challenges consisting of a variety of question types, including multiple choice, short
Page 5 of 7 Table 1. Users and roles. User/Role Site administrator Manager Course creator Teacher Non-editing teacher Student Guest Description Can create, manage, deploy the Moodle site, user configuration and management, and in simple an administrator can do everything on the site. Can access the course, and modify them. They usually don t participate in course Can create courses Add content to courses and can manage anything, including changing the activities and grades to students Can grade in courses but not edit them Can access and participate in courses, quizzes, polls, etc., Can view courses but not participate answer, true-false and descriptive. There is a repository to place all such identified questions called the Question Bank and it can be reused in several quizzes at several times. Self-assessment is an integral part of a virtual learning environment. There are many ways to provide feedback to students either at each question or an overall. The assessment module can display scores and feedback at different times during the quiz, using the quiz review settings. Planning and conducting an assessment in collaboration with a Partner College involves different members of the team as well as college faculty members from the partner college in different roles as shown in the below figure. There are several methods that are available for setting an assessment. An educator can chose to randomize questions or randomize answers to each student. An assessment can implicitly select specific questions from a question bank. An educator can also determine the number of questions that needs to be populated on each web page and position of each question. One of the pivotal features is to have modern assessment features that reveal the feedback to students on answering each question and possibly given another chance to answer the questions having read the comment (Figure 3). A wide range of reports for assessments are readily available for use by an educator or the college faculty member. The reports include a robust item analysis upon aggregated responses. Figure 3. Screenshot of assessment in a secured window. VII. STATISTICAL ANALYSIS AND RESULTS The assessment portal has been accessed by over 139,000 users (both students and college faculty members) across India from September 2008 to July 2014. Table 2 tabulates the statistics on the assessment portal for the list of identified items since the portal inception. There has been a significant increase in the participation of students over the last couple of years. It is pertinent to mention that the growth rate is almost double in the said period. At the inception, there
Page 6 of 7 Table 2. Assessment Portal statistics. Item FY 09 FY 10 FY 11 FY 12 FY 13 Total No. of user registrations 2072 4303 7518 12337 16673 42903 No. of Students assessed 6713 13942 24358 39972 54121 139106 No. of feedback conducted 9 18 29 41 56 153 No. of users accessed feedback 405 803 1286 1852 2539 6885 No. of Courses hosted 4 6 8 12 14 14* No. of Video resources 1 2 2 3 7 7* No. of questions in the Question Bank 226 454 767 872 959 3278 The above statistical report is taken from the financial year (FY), 2009 till financial year 2013, items indicated with an asterisk (*) are noncumulative. Figures for FY13 are currently incomplete. were very few video courses published on the portal, however a good number of video courses have now been added. This is a demonstration of innovation in terms of utilizing the best benefits of the digital infrastructure. During the process, not a single sheet of paper was used, showcasing ecofriendly and green credentials. This helped in reducing the carbon footprint and contributing to the globally acclaimed REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) initiative in developing countries. Assume a pen-paper mode of exam, having 100 questions would take 10 pages of print space has resulted in saving of 712030 (71203 student * 10 pages of printout) copies of printouts. Figure 4 shows the trends in number of users registered, users accessed content and assessed the assessment portal since FY 09. Figure 4. Assessment report on portal. Figure 5 is the feedback report. There is a steady improvement on the feedback offered. VIII. IMPACT The assessment portal attempts to change perspectives and inspires students to take the online learning and assessment. This has created an impact on students and college faculty members to effectively deploy the courseware and assessments. Many students and faculty found that the digital collaboration platform as a forum to network and hone their knowledge and skills. LMS has enhanced the productivity of all its stakeholders due to reduced efforts in design, review, delivery, reporting and analysis. Total man hour hours required for an assessment for 6 courses program was estimated to be 31 hours. The total effort has come down to 14 hours after automation of assessment, resulting in a saving of 17 hours of effort per batch. This led to higher productivity.
Page 7 of 7 Figure 5. Feedback Report on portal. The impact has been felt across all three dimensions that it touched i.e., students, college faculty, colleges and the organization.. Students from partnering colleges who attended the training program felt inspired and motivated towards digital and collaborative learning.. College faculty members got enabled in preparing question papers using the Bloom s taxonomy, understanding and implementing the learning and assessment tool, deploying courseware and assessments for students.. Colleges have achieved a great success in online learning and assessment using assessment portal. Results have shown appreciable increase in efficiency and effectiveness. A few colleges started using it for the assessment in their regular curriculum as well. From the organization s perspective, this initiative enabled to develop yet another way to meet its effectiveness. The program allowed the organization to assist academia in stimulating the minds of young students as they prepare for their careers. IX. CONCLUSIONS Moodle has emerged as most preferred Learning Management Systems due to its rich set of features and security. IUCEE has adopted Moodle as an interactive learning and assessment management system through which several engineering institutions, college faculty members and students have been enabled via several e-learning courses and assessed through online. Moodle has powered by the IUCEE association with its scalable, secured, cost effective, and management features. Self-assessment is an integral part of a virtual learning environment. There are many ways to provide feedback to students either at each question or an overall. The assessment module can display scores and feedback at different times during the quiz, using the quiz review settings. Acknowledgements Authors would like to thank students, faculty members and partnering colleges, team, Leadership team and external agencies for their support and deployment of the interactive learning and assessment portal. REFERENCES [1] Moodle Open Source System. http://moodle.org [2] IUCEE portal: https://iucee.org [3] Teresa Martín-Blas, Serrano Ana. The role of new technologies in the learning process: Moodle as a teaching tool in Physics. Computers & Education. 52. 2009:35 44. [4] Sudheer Reddy K, Srinagesh C. Leveraging Learning to Enhance Industry Readiness. 8 th IEEE International Conference on Comp. Sc. & Education, SLIIT, SriLanka. April, 2013:1204 1208. [5] Smith Gary. How Does Student Performance on Formative Assessments Relate to Learning Assessed by Exams? Journal of College Science Teaching. 2007. [6] Sudheer Reddy K, Srinagesh C. Leveraging Learning to Enhance Industry Readiness. 8 th IEEE International Conference on Comp. Sc. & Education, SLIIT, SriLanka. April, 2013:1204 1208.