Claims:1. Integrated computer-based system of imparting education, comprising of
a. A backend module, wherein the module comprises of
i. A database and/or cloud storage drives (e.g.: AWS S3) to store school/class/teacher/student details
ii. A file storage means, to store educational material in different file formats including audio/video stream, image, text, document, presentations, excel sheets etc
iii. An artificial intelligence module, to analyse the performance of a student and provide suggestion/ feedback to improve performance of student
iv. A backend web service
b. A portable device module, to input and upload data to the backend module and also to retrieve educational material from the backend and cast on a display means
c. A web module, to retrieve and view data from the backend and also upload data to the backend module
d. An embedded system with applications comprising of a display which provides means to project the files and receive interactive response from the student using the remote.
Further wherein the embedded system is in two-way communication with the portable device module
e. At least one remote to provide interactive responses by the student to teacher’s queries, evaluation, attendance etc.
Further wherein the remote has a unique identifier to map the remote with a particular student.
2. Integrated computer-based system of imparting education as claimed in claim 1 wherein the portable device module is an application deployed on smartphone or tablet computer
3. Integrated computer-based system of imparting education as claimed in claim 1 wherein the portable device module is used to cast queries on the display means of an embedded system
4. Integrated computer-based system of imparting education as claimed in claim 1 wherein the portable device module reviews the received data from the embedded system for data integrity before uploading to the backend
5. Integrated computer-based system of imparting education as claimed in claim 1 wherein remote and embedded system utilize Bluetooth Low Energy, Wi-Fi or ZigBee, RF interface to transmit and receive data respectively such as attendance or assessment data
6. Integrated computer-based system of imparting education as claimed in claim 1 wherein the remote and embedded system comprises of a battery to overcome problems of power cut especially in remote areas
7. Method of imparting education using integrated computer-based system, comprising the steps of,
entering or inputting school/ class/ teacher/ student details through mobile app and uploading the data into the backend,
receiving school/teacher/class/student details from mobile/PC clients into the backend and store in a database and/or cloud storage drives (e.g.: AWS S3, Google cloud, etc.),
casting the education material, attendance and assessment queries onto the connected embedded system (connected to display) using the mobile app,
providing of interactive responses by the students to teacher’s query, evaluation, attendance etc. using the remote,
receiving the attendance and assessment response in the mobile application from the embedded system,
reviewing of the received data by the mobile application from the embedded system and uploads into the backend,
analysing the data stored and providing customised recommendation and/ or suggestion and feedback using AI (Artificial Intelligence) for the enhancement of learning abilities for each and every student for better academic performance,
viewing reports of performance of a student, and for students under each teacher, in each class, in each school integrated in the system and include recommendation and/or suggestion and feedback from AI module in the backend on the web console, and
retrieving the stored education material in format audio/video, image, ppt, document, text, etc. from the backend using mobile app.
8. The method as claimed in Claim 7, further comprising the steps of,
authenticating attendance of students and their time spent in school by using geographical location of the school and Global Positioning System (GPS) in the devices through which they answer and thereafter analysing the data and generating reports on the same using AI (Artificial Intelligence),
verifying the accuracy of the attendance of teachers and the time spent in school and in teaching using Global Positioning System (GPS) in the devices that they use for teaching (mobile phones, tablets and PCs) and by measuring the amount of time the device has been in use and thereafter analysing the data and providing an assessment and generating reports using AI (Artificial Intelligence), and
assessment of received data on the performance of teacher(s) and analysing it using the AI (Artificial Intelligence) and provide customised feedback and/ or suggestions to improve the skills of the teacher(s) and map the improvement of their teaching skills by measuring the improvement in the learning outcomes of the students.
9. The method as claimed in Claim 7 wherein each student stay connected to the same network and/ or data pool even while studying at home and can get customised educational content from the system and also get assessment done.
10. The method as claimed in Claim 7 wherein the AI (Artificial Intelligence) module in the system provides the teachers and/ or students an index that will gauge their performance and also display their improvement in a monthly, quarterly, half yearly and yearly basis.
Further wherein the teachers and/ or students will be able to view the number of hours each student is dedicating to their academic requirements and also view the performance reports of the assessment exercises which were undertaken independently by the students while studying at home. , Description:FIELD OF INVENTION
[1] The present system relates to an integrated computer-based system for teaching, interacting, evaluating in real time and managing students with minimal manual intervention.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
[2] The present invention broadly relates to a system and method for addressing the paradoxes and problems associated with the present education system. The present invention provides an integrated digital system for teaching, interacting, evaluating in real time and managing students with less manual intervention. With the development of computer technology, mobile technology and Internet/Wi-Fi construction of this system has become possible.
[3] Educational systems are one area of information exchange that has yet to fully take advantage of the computer/mobile technology/ Internet's capability to provide information to individuals. Educational systems have primarily suffered from an inability to recreate the interactive nature of classroom lessons.
[4] The integration of teaching, interacting, evaluating in real time and providing feedback to the students is yet to come. There will also be a need to integrate technology for teaching, interacting, evaluating in real time and providing feedback into one system.
[5] In Conventional education systems the delivery of education material to students have been ineffective because they have not enabled a selection of an interactive communication channel by a teacher to communicate with a student and address the educational needs of the student individually. Currently the schools are using multiple applications for showing the education contents to the students like YouTube or any video player to show the video contents, PPT/Image for displaying slide shows. The present invention solves this problem by providing one system where all the data, including the educational material, school, class, teachers, students, attendance and assessment data are consolidated and can be viewed from a single mobile/PC application.
[6] In a conventional education system in school attendance are done manually on papers. In the present invention attendance are done by the remote system, the students will be holding the remote to give the attendance, attendance can be viewed in mobile/web application regularly. Also, attendance can be registered for each and every class which will show how many students were present in each class. Registering attendance in this technique will also save time and leave more time for the teacher to teach.
[7] In the conventional system, there is no way to interact with the students and record responses immediately and also the response provided by the students during the interaction are lost and teachers may not recall the performance of every student during the students’ performance review. The present invention was made to solve such problems by providing a system which can record all interaction immediately without any manual intervention.
[8] In a conventional education system evaluation done are mostly on papers and the evaluation results remain recorded on the paper. The education material, student detail & evaluation result is spread out at multiple locations and are not consolidated which create difficulties when a teacher wants to analyse a student’s past performance and provide feedback. The present invention solves this problem by providing a system to analyse students past performance and provide feedback via artificial intelligence.
[9] In the conventional and/or the present education system there are no single platform invented for teaching, evaluating in real time and providing feedback to the students. Currently the schools are using multiple applications for teaching, evaluating and providing feedback to the students. The present invention solves this problem by having developed an integrated digital system for teaching, interacting, evaluating in real time and managing students with less manual intervention.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
[10] The primary objective of the present invention is to provide an integrated digital system for teaching, interacting, evaluating in real time and managing students with minimal manual intervention. The disclosed system achieves this objective by having all the data, including the educational material, school, class, teachers, students, student’s attendance, assessment data, consolidated and visible from a single mobile/PC application.
[11] Another important objective of the present system is to help improve performance of the students by providing an ability to analyse the student evaluation data and past performance and provide recommendation and/or suggestions and feedback for improvement using artificial intelligence.
[12] Another objective of the invention is to make the education system more interactive. The interactive nature of the invention is obtained by using a remote which is provided to the students for recording attendance or provide interactive responses to teacher’s query, evaluation etc. Interaction and/ or responses from the students are recorded immediately in the system without any manual intervention and the attendance taken by using remote button from the student is directly fed into the system.
[13] Advantages of the present system includes:
[14] All the data including the education material, school, class, teachers, students, attendance, and assessment data are consolidated and visible from a single mobile/PC application.
[15] The present system includes the provision to analyse the past performance of students using artificial intelligence and provide instant recommendation and/ or feedback to the current teacher as well as to the future teachers. Thus, helping the teacher to understand their pupil better.
[16] The attendance of students using the present system is efficient and accurate as the data from the student remote is directly fed into the system and there is no manual entry.
[17] The teacher student interaction via remote is recorded immediately without any manual intervention.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF DRAWING
[18] The following description of illustrative embodiments is better understood when read in conjunction with the appended drawings. For the purpose of illustrating the present disclosure, exemplary constructions of the disclosure are shown in the drawings:
[19] Figure 1 is the pictorial representation of the working of the disclosed integrated computer-based system of imparting education.
[20] Figure 2 depicts the fetching of analysed data for a particular student.
[21] Figure 3 depicts storing of evaluation data for a particular student in the system.
[22] Figure 4 depicts storing of attendance data for a particular student in the system.
[23] Figure 5 depicts system of storing and verifying attendance for teachers / staff using GPS data.
[24] Figure 6 depicts the working of the teacher evaluation module in the system.
[25] Figure 7 depicts the storing and retrieval of education and assessment content in the system.
[26] Figure 8 depicts the steps involved at the Hardware Gateway of the system pertaining to storage, assessment and display of data.
[27] Figure 9 depicts working of the remote communication with the present system.
DETAILED DESCRIPTION
[28] The following discussion includes a general description of a suitable computing environment in which the invention may be implemented. While the invention will be described in the general context of an application program that runs on an operating system in conjunction with a personal computer, those skilled in the art will recognize that the invention also may be implemented in combination with other program modules. Generally, program modules include routines, programs, components, data structures, etc. that performs particular tasks or implement particular abstract data types. Moreover, those skilled in the art will appreciate that the invention may be practiced with other computer system configurations, including hand-held devices, multiprocessor systems, microprocessor-based or programmable consumer electronics, minicomputers, mainframe computers, and the like. The invention may also be practiced in distributed computing environments where tasks are performed by remote processing devices that are linked through a communications network. In a distributed computing environment, program modules may be located in both local and remote memory storage devices.
[29] It is a known fact that each student perceives education differently and therefore the performance of each student in a class differs. The present invention addresses this difference by providing an interactive education system which has the ability to analyse and assess data of each student and offers feedback for performance improvement. The invention thus prevents education from becoming straightjacket. It enables the educators to understand the performance of each student and offers suggestions to for improvement.
[30] Now referring to Fig. 1, the preferred embodiment of the disclosed invention comprises of the following components
a. Backend cloud services
b. Mobile Application (Android/ IOS or any available OS)
c. Web Application
d. HW (Hardware) Gateway Device - An Embedded System with applications
e. Remotes
[31] Data such as the details of the schools, class, teachers, students, etc. is received and stored in a web-accessible database and/ or cloud storage drives (e.g.; AWS S3, Google cloud, etc.) in the backend. Apart from the details mentioned above, the attendance, assessments and individual performance of the students is also stored in the backend. The file storage means in the backend stores and serves all the education content in different file formats including Video/Audio, Image, Text, Assessment Questions etc.
[32] When a request for certain details is received by the backend module, it responds back by serving the details or educational material files to the portable device or on the web module.
[33] The backend module is also disposed with an Artificial Intelligence (AI) module which analyses the data stored and provides remedial content recommendation and/ or suggestion and feedback for improving the performance of a particular student.
[34] The educators are provided access to a portable device module. In the preferred embodiment, the portable device is a smartphone or a tablet computer disposed with an application to access the disclosed system. The portable device is used to enter details of school, class, teacher, student through the installed application. Said data is uploaded onto the backend. The portable device is also used to enter the attendance data of students every day and every class which is also uploaded into backend.
[35] For the purpose of evaluation, students written answers (answer sheets) to assessment tasks (questions will have multiple choice where only one answer will be correct or objective type questions) will be captured through the mobile app via the mobile phone camera by the teacher or educators (where due to certain reasons remote is not available). The mobile app will process the camera image and arrive at the answers provided by the students for various questions. Also, the assessment answers (answer sheets) from the students can be received via remote. These answers will be uploaded into the backend.
[36] The educators or users can also use the portable device module to upload any educational material into the backend. The web module can also be used to conveniently upload educational material to the backend. Similarly, the portable device or the web module could be used to retrieve the educational material from the backend. The data retrieved using the web module may be displayed directly on to the laptop or PC or the portable device can be used to cast the educational material or data, on to a connected display means.
[37] In the preferred embodiment, the portable device module, on receiving the attendance and assessment response from the embedded system, review the received data for data integrity and uploads into backend.
[38] The web application of the disclosed invention is a console application which enables retrieving of data from the backend and viewing the data on the web interface. The application could also be used to upload data concerning school, class or students and the educational material in different formats into the backend. The formats which may be stored and retrieved from the backend include audio/video stream, image, text, document, presentations, excel sheets etc.
[39] In an exemplary embodiment, the analysed data can be presented in the form of reports concerning the performance of any student, class, teacher or school etc. The web module is also used to view the suggestions/ feedback from the Artificial Intelligence module in the backend.
[40] The preferred embodiment of the disclosed invention also comprises of an embedded device with applications. The embedded device is connected to a display means and thus enables the user to project educational material or any other data by casting on to the display.
[41] In accordance with the present embodiment, the embedded device provides functionality of Audio/ Video input/ output through at least one of the methods of HDMI, Composite, Component or SPDIF to project the education material, assessment questions to a display device e.g.: a TV, Projector etc.
[42] The embedded system communicates with the portable device using network interface (Wi-Fi, Ethernet) to receive/send the data from/to the portable device via REST APIs, HTTP, FTP, RTSP, etc. or by any other means.
[43] The embedded device and the remote communicate with each other using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Wi-Fi or ZigBee, RF interface to receive data from remote button press. Mainly the attendance, assessment answers from the students will be received via remote.
[44] In an embodiment of the present invention the embedded system is disposed with a battery to overcome frequent power cuts. This is especially useful in remote areas and villages where electricity supply is not consistent.
[45] In the preferred embodiment of the invention, the system comprises of at least one remote in communication with the embedded system to provide the interactivity to the students. The students will be holding the remote to provide interactive responses to teacher’s query, evaluation, attendance etc. The remote will have Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or ZigBee, RF interface to transmit data to the embedded device.
[46] In accordance with the preferred embodiment, the remote will have battery to last for many days/months. A unique identifier will be associated with the remote to map the remote with the student. This will allow the attendance and responses to be mapped to the student in the system.
[47] Figure 2 depicts the steps involved in fetching of analysed data for a particular student from the backend module. On receiving a request for fetching educational content or evaluation results for a particular student, along with fetching the past data stored in the database, the Artificial Intelligence module generates recommendations for next educational content or evaluation questions based on the assessment of the student. The remedial educational content and evaluation questions are retrieved and displayed in response to the request.
[48] Figure 3 and Figure 4 generally display the steps involved in collecting the evaluation answers and attendance data respectively through the backend web module and storing the same in the database. The system then generates an alert for success / failure of the storage operation.
[49] In an exemplary embodiment of the present invention, the system could automatically verify presence of staff / teachers near the school when they mark their attendance. Figure 5 depicts said attendance marking and verification module. Firstly, the system records the GPS location coordinates of the school in the backend cloud module, the teacher / staff attendance data along with school GPS data is sent to the backend web module. Using the mobile location of the teacher / staff it is verified if the concerned person is in close proximity to the school location. Once location is verified, the attendance is stored in the system and notification or alert is sent out.
[50] Figure 6 depicts the teacher assessment module wherein the on requesting performance data for a particular teacher, the system retrieves performance data of students under said teacher, the attendance data of teacher and various activities done by the teacher using the system application. The data is analysed on the basis of which the teacher’s performance is rated or scored and sent to the backend web module to be displayed.
[51] Figure 7depicts the steps involved in storing and retrieval of education and assessment content in the system. Once the teacher has logged into the system, the educational content and assessment data is downloaded, the attendance data is received from the hardware gateway device and the educational content is sent to hardware gateway device for display. The display of data could be through streaming or casting. The assessment questions are sent to the hardware gateway device and the answers from students are received.
[52] In an exemplary embodiment of the disclosed system, the answer sheets used by the students follow a pattern for easy detection of answers. The images of the answer sheets are captured by the systems and uploaded into the database through the web interface along with attendance data of the students.
[53] Figure 8 depicts the Hardware Gateway of the system pertaining to storage, assessment and display of data.
[54] Figure 9 depicts working of the remote communication with the present system by which attendance and assessment responses are sent by the remote to be received hardware gateway device receiver using Bluetooth Low Energy, Zigbee, RF or similar technology.
[55] Having thus described a few particular embodiments of the invention, various alterations, modifications, and improvements will readily occur to those skilled in the art. Such alteration, modifications, and improvements as are made obvious by this disclosure are intended to be part of this description though not expressly stated herein and are intended to be within the spirit and scope of the invention. Accordingly, the foregoing description is by way of example only, and not limiting.