G-Learner

Problem Inspiration

Lack of curated online learning contents which complement students’ prescribed syllabus in their educational institutions are becoming a prominent hindrance to the learning ability of the students. Students are becoming rather ignorant or it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find the right learning resources amidst the plethora of personal, technological and open-source community blogs and information-sharing sites available on the Internet. Students who can’t digest the information taught in their institutions are, in most cases, unable to find the right content pertaining to their subject online. When it comes to education in India, traditional classroom teaching is most prominent and is still approached with little to no use of technology, so accessing the news, resources, and technical materials for emerging technology is difficult. It takes a long time to create an empowered society that helps the students with their learning interests because modern media is downgrading. Even if there exists a material that would help the learners to learn the art of product building, it will not be free of cost at the early stages, and even though there exists a study material, it is mainly click baits or revenue-making websites through pop-ups. According to research, proper Web search is not done by users to get results for what they search for, and in the modern decade of technology, the concept of open-source contribution is not known by many and is not even promoted.

India Today: “India has a deficit of over 1 million school teachers: UNESCO report” Indian Express: “Our teacher education system must be aligned to global standards” The Hindu: “How digitization and technology are shaping education in India” “Ed-tech is attempting to fix India’s education system, but its mass adoption is still a far fledged goal”

Validation Of The Problem Through Data Collection And Analysis

With the advent of Covid-19, there has been a tremendous increase in the popularity of online-based learning. Students have become more accustomed to learning from videos; rewinding, replaying, and exploring the content through multiple sources. The sudden switch to complete offline-based learning has led to poorer performance, with students being unable to gain a deeper understanding of the subject on account of not raising their doubts to their teachers since being accustomed to staying silent during online classes. There are two possible solutions to this problem, either allow the students to get accustomed to the offline learning method and encourage them to post their doubts more frequently during class hours or the other method is to expose the students to a blended learning mode similar to SPOC to allow the students to learn more effectively contributing to the offline learning. Studies show that when online courses are widely used in today’s complex environment, the advantages and disadvantages of online teaching are gradually revealed. Teachers made a horizontal comparison and summary of online courses and found that students’ practical application ability and consciousness were poor. This further shows that the traditional offline teaching mode cannot be replaced. Hence an integrated teaching mode is required for in-depth learning. The network platform and physical teaching resources need to be integrated in order to increase the universality and interest of the teaching content. Research shows that when employed with a hybrid learning approach, most students can keep paying attention to the learning content and cooperate with the teachers to raise their hands in class activities. A small number of students play with mobile phones and lose concentration. Then, the online teaching effect is integrated by means of the flipped classroom, and the online platform is combined with offline teaching. After students acquire knowledge by themselves through online videos, teachers will explain the difficult problems in the knowledge points in offline classes to consolidate the key and difficult knowledge. The problem with this approach is that, currently in educational institutes, it is difficult to manage when students are allowed to bring their smartphones and laptops to classrooms, which evidently are banned in most of the educational institutes in our state. Hence, it is difficult or rather impossible to conduct hybrid learning right in the classrooms, and asking teachers to post and curate online videos for the students, during their personal time after work doesn’t seem ethical as well. Hence a different approach to this hybrid learning is a must. It also has to be made sure that minimum effort is required from the teachers, without actually sacrificing the quality of the content. This approach also has to be accessible to the students and must be fluidly integrated with their learning approach.

Our Solution

G-Learner is a “One-stop solution for learning resources”. It is an LMS (Learning Management System) solution for educational institutions with an integrated AI (Artificial Intelligence) model that is capable of crawling through the internet and fetches modern and updated learning resources pertaining to the requested topic with maximum accuracy and reliability to the user/student and optimizes itself through Reinforcement Learning to provide content of maximum value on further uses. This platform can also be deployed on the cloud, if the organization is unable to provide dedicated private servers, and can still enjoy the high-level security offered by the Cloud Platforms. The AI analyzes the performance of the student through the frequent quizzes conducted on the platform on the specific topic, and presents the students with materials in correlation to his present learning abilities, which would maximize his/her learning rate. The quizzes can be drafted by the faculties, or if required the AI can be requested to suggest the quiz questions pertaining to the topic as well. The main reason for integrating the AI model with an LMS platform is that in recent times, LMS platforms have been playing a vital role in educational institutions but they currently focus only on the submission and sharing of materials but do not provide any window for further learning. This was the inspiration to create a Unique LMS which would perform the traditional material sharing, while also providing curated content to aid the students. The institutes and students will have no trouble switching to this kind of hybrid learning, as the AI solution is integrated right alongside with the familiar LMS platforms and thus providing high accessibility. The UI/UX of the LMS is also made friendly to go along with the AI model to make sure the information is digested at ease. Hence we are proposing a Smart LMS platform with emphasis on design and accessibility.

Project Description And High Level Design

Frontend - Web application made using React. Server - Golang / Express server with integrated connections to database and the AI model. AI - A Deep Learning / Reinforcement Learning model deployed as a scalable REST API in a remote cloud server with its own separate database server. Database - A cloud service or a dedicated non relational database server implemented using MongoDB.