4.3 Disability Friendly Technology – Punarjani, and e-learning Framework developed by C-DAC 

4.3 Disability Friendly Technology – Punarjani, and e-Learning Framework developed by C-DAC

Punarjani - Assessment Tool for the Intellectual Disabled: C-DAC Trivandrum is engaged in developing an assessment tool named Punarjani. The system will collect a lot of data about a particular child with Intellectual Disability, like developmental history, school history, home environment, social environment, etc., and will be capable of suggesting a long-term goal for the disabled. It also helps the teacher concerned to select a suitable strategy.

C-DAC has developed a number of indigenous solutions for content management, evaluation and assessment, virtual classroom, and collaboration for the e-learning domain. Some of the solutions are listed below:

• e-Shiksha is a learning management system with rich support for Indian languages.

• National Online Examination System (NOES) is an examination system primarily aimed at conducting recruitment.

• Online Labs (Olabs) for school lab experiments provides students with the ease and convenience of conducting experiments over the Internet.

• Veda is a general-purpose online testing and question banking system, primarily supporting multiple choice questions (including its variant forms such as match the following).

• Video conferencing solutions for building virtual classrooms supporting synchronous lectures are also available from C-DAC.

• e-Saadhya (Saral Anukulaney Adhyayan), an adaptable and accessible e-learning framework for children with mild mental retardation and Autism, is being developed with the domain support from the National Institute for the Mentally Handicapped (NIMH) with local language support in three Indian languages: Hindi, Telugu, and Kannada.

• An academic networking portal for faculty members, students, and academic institutions to network and share information about courses, academic events, projects, etc., has been created through a portal called SEEKHA.

e-Learning Framework developed by C-DAC

• e-Learning is an innovative technology that removes the barriers of distance and time, providing greater flexibility, allowing the learner to learn at his/her own pace. e-Sikshak is an e-Learning environment developed by C-DAC, Hyderabad to support this new learning paradigm.

Salient features of e-Sikshak:

1. Course Organizer

   • Support for 3-level course organization with a hierarchy of Course, Module, and Lesson

   • Create and modify courses

   • Course Reports

2. Online Assessment

   • Question bank creation

   • Multiple-choice single answers

   • Multiple-choice multiple answers

   • True or False questions

   • Uploading of assignments by instructor

   • Uploading solutions by student

   • Student performance reports

3. Whiteboard

   • Synchronous communication between student and instructor

   • Graphical interface to simulate real-world Whiteboard

   • Facilitates drawings with color; all drawing tools like rectangle, circle, free-hand, etc.

   • Text with desired color font, etc.

   • Shared discussion area between student and instructor

4. Bulletin Board

   • Creates forums for subject discussions

   • Thread-based discussions

   • Search

5. Chat

   • Real-time communication between instructor and learner

   • Public chat between student and instructor

   • Blocking/unblocking chat users by the instructor

6. e-Mail

   • Asynchronous communication tool

   • Facilitates offline interaction with instructor or among the student community

   • Attachment facility

7. User Management

   • The portal efficiently handles user management in the successful implementation of the course. The different users involved are:

     1. Administrator Can

        • Manage users

        • Create and update courses

        • Assign learners to the courses

     2. Instructor Can

        • Upload course material

        • Maintain question bank

        • Evaluate assignments

        • Activate discussion forums

     3. Learner Can

        • Register into multiple courses

        • Access course material and download

        • Get the performance report

        • Take online test

e-Sikshak is a Multi-lingual e-Learning Framework

1. Unicode-based multilingual solution

2. Customizable Graphical User Interface

3. Supports multimedia content

4. Portable to MySQL and Oracle

5. Servlet-based server-side technology