Select government school complexes in the state of Telangana will deploy artificial intelligence (AI) tools to automate several processes such as formative assessments, marking attendance, and logging mid-day meals data, among others. The tools will also be used to aid English teaching as well as other languages later on. A school complex is a cluster of high school, middle, and primary schools.
The pilot project of the AI tools will be implemented by the International Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad (IIIT-Hyderabad) in school complexes in Moinabad. As per reports, IIIT-Hyderabad has been working closely with select school complex headmasters, resource authorities, and officials from the Education Department to understand how AI and other new-age tech solutions can increase opportunities at the grassroots level.
The organisations plan to meet the concerned people once again and make specific plans for the technology interventions possible, an official explained, adding that they 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. A lot of manual work is involved in collecting school-related data and uploading it on education portals.
The process is important but time-consuming. The idea is to see how AI-based cameras, speech recognition technologies, and other tools can be used to mark attendance, midday meals, and other schooling activities. For this, IIIT-Hyderabad will collaborate with start-ups or technology companies that have already developed technologies for these challenges. It will also build technologies that are in research.
According to a report, the Education Policy 2021 made the formative assessment of students mandatory. Each week, teachers need to evaluate every class and make a report to gauge the understanding of the students on various lessons. 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. IIIT-Hyderabad will use an AI-based camera system and model it to assess the students on these attributes. It can generate a report that the teachers can use to plan additional support for 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.
Ramesh Loganathan, the Co-Innovation Professor at IIIT-Hyderabad said, “We have the 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.”
The government has been creating and launching several educational courses and programmes in emerging technology to meet the rising demand for IT experts. In January, the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras (IIT-Madras) announced it would offer free Python and AI upskilling courses to more than one million socially and economically disadvantaged youth in India. IIT-Madras and an Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-Ahmedabad)-incubated start-up, GUVI, partnered with the All-India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) to develop the courses. The skills included in the initiative focus on face recognition technology specifically for beginners.
As OpenGov Asia reported, the courses will be taught in English, Tamil, Hindi, and Telugu, among others. Free access to the courses will be available through a registration process enabled on GUVI’s official website.