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Inspiration
The classroom experience has drastically changed over the years. Today, most students and professors prefer to conduct their course organization and lecture notes electronically. Although there are applications that enabled a connected classroom, none of them are centered around measuring students' understanding during lectures.
The inspiration behind Enrich was driven by the need to create a user-friendly platform that expands the possibilities of electronic in-class course lectures: for both the students and the professors. We wanted to create a way for professors to better understand the student's viewpoint, recognize when their students need further help with a concept, and lead a lecture that would best provide value to students.
What it does
Enrich is an interactive course organization platform. The essential idea of the app is that professor can create "classrooms" to which students can add themselves using a unique key provided by the professor. The professor has the ability to create multiple such classrooms for any class that he/she teaches. For each classroom, we provide a wide suite of services to enable a productive lecture.
An important feature in our app is a "learning ratio" statistic, which lets the professor know how well he/she is teaching the topics. As the teacher is going through the material, students can anonymously give real-time feedback on how they are responding to the lecture.The aggregation of this data is used to determine a color gradient from red (the lecture is going poorly) to green (the lecture is very clear and understandable). This allows the teacher to slow down if she recognizes that students are getting lost.
We also have a speech-to-text translation service that transcribes the lecture as it is going, providing students with the ability to read what the teacher is saying. This not only provides accessibility to those who can't hear, but also allows students to go back over what the teacher has said in the lecture.
Lastly, we have a messaging service that connects the students to Teaching Assistants during the lecture. This allows them to ask questions to clarify their understanding without disrupting the class.
How we built it
Our platform consists of two sides to it: Learners and Educators. We used React.js as the front-end for both the Learner-side and Educator-side of our application. The whole project revolves around a effectively organized Firebase RealTime database, which stores the hierarchy of professor-class-student relationships. The React Components interface with Firebase to update students as and when they enter and leave a classroom. We also used Pusher to develop the chat service on the classrooms.
For the speech-to-text detection, we used the Google Speech-to-Text API to detect speech from the Educator's computer, transcribe this, and update the Firebase RealTime database with the transcript. The web application then updates user-facing site with the transcript.
Challenges we ran into
The database structure on Firebase is quite intricate Figuring out the best design for the Firebase database was challenging, because we wanted a seamless way to structure classes, students, their responses, and recordings. The speech-to-text transcription was also very challenging. We worked through using various APIs for the service, before finally settling on the Google Speech-to-Text API. Once we got the transcription service to work, it was hard to integrate it into the web application.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were proud of getting the speech-to-text transcription service to work, as it took a while to connect to the API, get the transcription, and then transfer that over to our web application.
What we learned
Despite using React for previous projects, we utilized new ways of state management through Redux that made things much simpler than before. We have also learned to integrate different services within our React application, such as the Chatbox in our application.
What's next for Enrich - an education platform to increase collaboration
The great thing about Enrich is that it has a massive scope to expand! We had so many ideas to implement, but only such little time. We could have added a camera that tracks the expressions of students to analyze how they are reacting to lectures. This would have been a hands-off approach to getting feedback. We could also have added a progress bar for how far the lecture is going, a screen-sharing capability, and interactive whiteboard.
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