 Namaste, good morning. I am Amuja Sagarkar from the University of Mumbai. Me and my colleagues are here to share our experiences of imparting education to distance students and regular students as well as specially gifted or challenged students. Mumbai University as my colleague yesterday has mentioned is a big complex system, one of the very early universities in India. We have seven lakh students who are taking education in regular mode and we have one lakh students, they are taking education in distance mode. Amongst the distance mode education we have more than, every year we get hundreds of students who are visually impaired and physically disabled and all. So that made us to think of how can we facilitate those people or differently challenge the people and can there be any system. This presentation has three types of things I can say. One is about our experience of imparting education to the students so we have developed some applications which we would like to incorporate as a part of Moodle, so plug-ins we are looking for. And towards the end we will have some things which would help us for taking the research ahead. So here, let me start with one of the success stories. Yesterday many a times it is heard that regular face-to-face what we call it face-to-face university students or college students and teachers, they generally are not very enthusiastic in implementing Moodle kind of things because they say that is something for the large scale. And when we meet every day why should we go? And even if somebody enthusiastically set up some such venture, then updates are very rarely seen and most of the times that becomes that has only vanity held you where my department has set up a Moodle server. So it is not continued. My colleagues only were telling yesterday from Alkesh Dinesh Modi and all that enthusiasm is less and we need to incorporate many features and all how to do that is what the question is. Now let me start with the story which is a true success story. My colleague Ani is there here. She wanted to, her responsibility was to handle 300 students to meet some exams, assignment submissions and a quiz per semester. So we all know, many of us yesterday shared this kind of experiences that this is very much burdened and where all the time is to go for the Moodle kind of activities. But here once this was interested to her, she got Moodle as a solution. So she went on her own and set up her own Moodle server on her web page where the college did not support initially. And then she could show that, yes, it works. For her, the challenge was, one more challenge was there. Yeah, teaching administration and research, those are trivial things for a college teacher and university teacher. But her college location is such that it is very tempting. It's at the seashore. So always handing out the students from the seashore and getting them into the class and then asking them to be in the examination. That was a task. And therefore, this lady decided, okay, let them enjoy the seashore, not a problem, just what? They have to respond to me from the seashore. And that worked very nicely. Now, yeah, it's a really true story, which I was also very much inspired by her gesture. Now, she has put up this thing, the link is open for 15 days. Which day you want to sit wherever, that's your choice. And then after that, the link will be closed. And then, of course, then she can start her assessment and then she does everything on Moodle assessment. As and when the assessment is carried out, immediately students are receiving the responses, what they have submitted and then how they have made progress. So students are happy to listen to those things and they also can interact amongst themselves, and the seashore and then talking to the teachers. So this was a very interesting scenario which I can say and enjoy the learning and all that happened over there. Next was, well, when she was successful in doing that, then the college management was interested in knowing what is happening. Every time she is on time and then students are enjoying and doing, it was a task for BICOM and BS students teaching them computer science. But still they enjoyed it. So then college people when they know, okay, she has done something interesting, say how can we take it ahead. Then there were some people approached that's under philanthropy, rural areas, teachers and students, how can we equip them. This lady went and set up a Moodle workshop which also worked online. Everywhere from the rural of Goa, she is from Goa, they connected to her server and she had trained some of them and sessions at their requirement, their convenience, they were, they are trained and now, okay, one more step they want to go ahead, how can we use these things for our people. So maybe there are a couple of hundred students in a school and if you want to allow them or engage them, it's not a matter that how big setup you have. Given a very small setup also, you can encourage the students. That is what the story tells you. Most of us know the hole in the wall project that caught attention of a world in education. So a very small type of computer was put up and many people were attracted towards these kids especially and that was a kind of interactive and collaborative learning that they encouraged. Sugato Mitra's project. Now this happened the same, on the same line I can take this, she suggested don't go for 100 machines lab or something like that, which calls for money, for administration and everything, which you probably may not afford. Now have a small lab where 10-15 machines are kept and it will be open for couple of hours after your office hours are open, office hours are done. Now the students will come over there, chit chat, interact, they can go for play on the ground, whatever they want and some of them will turn to this lab also, there they do something and again this will continue. So today's group may not be coming tomorrow and therefore 15 machines are enough for 200 students in that school. But that is how the freedom and volunteer learning was encouraged. Now the teachers, whoever were available from college and universities, they are so conspired, as a part of our Moodal venture, now the mentoring is done online. It's not possible for me, even if I'm very enthusiastic to help my students and kids around to allocate the time like every day I will be available on so and so day. If it is available, if there is a calendar I can say, okay, Mark, I'm available today. So either of us will be available and kids are taken care. So that's how it helped and definitely that is one of the very success stories. Another success story I want to take ahead was about how to collect the feedback. Yesterday my colleague, I do really appreciate her gesture of allowing us to participate in that feedback. How to keep the students engaged. Now here it is a story of my colleague. She is Manisha. She always was thinking collecting feedback from the students itself is a task because we have to create questions of different variety. So now creating a question calls for a different type of skills. So how to train teacher on that skill was a question. So her solution was not that she said, okay, let us allow teachers, students, whoever wants to collaborate on that, creating a question. Let us put a question bank and then question bank, of course, when we create a question back as a central effort, then it has to have a structured and sensible questions. Whereas my students and many of us also are not very good at creating a very good quality, clear questions, less vague questions and given the type of the question based upon the given type creating the question. So her solution was we can have something like they will let them create a raw question and the raw question, she has created a program which modifies that question and get it to the well-formed question. So she calls it from ill-formed question to well-formed question. Now those well-formed questions become a part of our question repository. From there another problem is solved when I was dealing with distance education of 1 lakh students because of our engagement with the student and learning enhancement efforts, we had an idea that every day let us put one question to the students. Let them answer or not, some of them will answer and others will at least come to know some such things are happening. Many times in distance mode it is a requirement that we should keep our students awakened. I was thinking, chatbot was a wonderful thing but then chatbot works helps you when you go there and ask a question. So what I meant is that we have to go and check whether the students are awake and if not then we have to keep them sending alerts saying be awake, here is something for you. So sending one question a day was an interesting idea but my teachers had the same thing, every day sending a question may not be possible. Now this repository is readily available so quickly they can pick up the script, small script is there that picks it up. Now how we created that? The question was how to create a large number of questions. One of our experiences is that we were working with the spoken tutorial. Once the spoken tutorial, of course that is also self-learning environment, after completing the spoken tutorial a student is supposed to take a test and understand where each level the student is, a learner is. So that is why we are creating questions manually. Later on when the number grew like 1,000 students were trained it was difficult for us. Then what we tried was always keeping the students interest engaged is more happening more when we ask students to create questions then to we ask them to answer the questions. If we ask them to answer the questions then most probably they pick up the answer and instead what I asked them is now you have taken the tutorial you pose a question so that I will learn the type of questions you are posing I will know how much you are through it. Through that experiment we created around 500 questions in one week and the question bank was refined that time manually but now I am sure we can go ahead with Manisha's automatic question quality enhancer model. Thank you. This is what an automatic question quality enhancer model what we are expecting over here that instead of generating the questions which is a job of the tutor so we want to assist the tutor either the tutor can generate the questions or if you are providing a tool that a machine can generate the question for us that what a study material is being provided based on that what a question can be generated but of course we know that what artificial intelligence is playing a role over here. So we have to think that what generated questions are of the good quality or not. So the observation is that some of the questions are accepted by the human annotators but the few of the questions we have observed that they are with the informities like mathematical questions or maybe the vague questions like that so our model is that taking those questions generated by the machine or a human it will find it out that based on the surface feature that those questions are ill-formed or well-formed if the questions means based on those features first of all the score is being generated so score decides that whether the question is to be acceptable or it would be rejected. So we have defined over here a threshold value that is about 3.5 we can say the questions need some sort of a modification and below that what the questions mostly what we can say that what they should be rejected. So a score model will check the questions score based on that rejection strategy or a modification strategy or some sort of a sentence simplification strategy would be defined. So questions which are not being further enhanced we observed that those questions are not being enhanced due to the complex structure of a sentence. So this is what a functioning of our small script this is what one of the example I want to share with you we are providing a simple sentence to the system we call it as a best sentence that Tiaq obtained his Bachelor of Arts a statement is to be now what machine is doing machine is automatically generating a questions based on this best sentence now a question generated we have to rate whether we should accept such questions or not now what happened over here underlined phrase of is a partial phrase considered by a system to frame a question and of course a human evaluator has rejected this question saying that what a question is not correct because of what a some of the part of an answer phrase is present in the questions. So what our suggestion is to be so our equi model suggests that a complete answer phrase is this that is Bachelor of Arts and based on that again you reformulate these questions and give a correct question to the system similarly another example what we can say this is very simple factabake question is being generated when two noun phrases comes with a numeral adjectives that time a system failed to extract those numeral adjectives so one numeral adjective is extracted but another numeral adjective associated with that noun phrase is not being removed by the system so such kind of an errors are being marked and those are being removed so these are what the benefits we can find of course as we discussed in the morning that we are not replacing the humans or we can say the tutors but we are assisting the tutors so this saves the time as a questions are ready so we can have to monitor that which are the good quality questions which are triggering cognitive questions and different kind of questions like a factabased as well as what a general based questions can be formulated and more engagement is being possible through this module thank you so with this the question the task was the student can just select the text and then questions are generated and then those are modified then we continued with the competitive spirit yesterday what the things was discussed this is how it is helping and in our environment that kind of culture is not there students are coming only for the examination purpose I disagree with this opinion because out of our experience what we observed was if there is a competitive environment the spirit is already up I can quote a number of examples where the previous students were not very enthusiastic but because we kept on posting what is happening in the community they were picking up yes I want to go ahead of somebody and therefore the healthy competition was observed and automatically as a side effect we had so many things like content and all content and question banks were generated so it is like results highlighted and posted on group and get more pupils with added enthusiasm was our experience now assessment of descriptive type responses MOOC encourages peer evaluation that was a very much thing when my colleagues were scared of one lakh students you are asking us to send keep online and internal evaluation test and all how are we going to face it I said leave it to me as a CS person don't do it at yours pretty simple thing what we planned was whenever we employed this thing for a small scale or last scale when it is a model that doesn't make any difference to the machine so for 300 students if I can work with for 30000 students doesn't make any difference as long as my machine and my server is supporting and we have good infrastructure now MCQ type questions automatically the logs and all were posted we followed the same practice which was proposed in MOOC some of the times the bunch of questions randomly teacher human teacher or the this one teacher assistant would evaluate and send the responses share their opinions so that keeps the community awakened stating that yes they are evaluating not that always 30000 students questions were evaluated human by human then using the log at which time who posted the questions we got to know who are sincere and all for our opinions whoever were responding they were obviously very more sincere than the others and therefore almost our job of creating the records for internal as a part of internal evaluation was taken care now then all that excitement was happening around and one day I came across a student who came and told me yes I am a part of this excitement but can we reduce our my dependency the person was visually challenged and then we started evaluating what is available in the Moodle so the things what we got were there screen reader text-to-speech converters simple interface direct to links and everything those are available but then the things like shortcut keys voice authentication and word prediction plugins which would be telling what is happening on the board that was not there seriously 5% of the VC visually challenged people keep mathematics at their and their SSC level because they don't find readers for them therefore we went in that direction then one of my colleagues Prashan he worked on this problem and came up with an idea we first studied what is the problem why the normal screen readers are not the solutions for a mathematics text reader to us a mathematics text reader is something which has non-linearity involved into that let me change the sequence mathematics reader see there can be an example like x raise to 2 is something written over there a linear reader cannot read that kind of stuff so Prashan has come up with a solution where we developed a syntax for linear reading of a non-linear text and then converted into it so this could be another plugin for a Moodle good morning all our basic aim was to convert a non-linear mathematical structure into linear mathematical structure and for that we have developed the mathematics that is a mathematical text reader this is a schematic block diagram of mathematical text reader and we have the three blocks in it the first block is a mathematics input block the second one is a mathematics parser and the third one is a mathematics linear form generator in the first part we are supposed to take one image as an input it will check whether it is a multi-line or not if it is a multi-line it will crop the lines if it is a not multi-line it will pass to the next block that is a mathematical parser where we are supposed to check the compound entities now here just take an example of the summation Proud we have taken them as a compound entity because these entities have been embedded with the lower limit and upper limit means for example if we have the summation and the upper limit is written at the upwards and we are supposed to scan all these characters so we are just separating those characters and later on we are passing to our OCR where we are getting the proper text conversion of these entities later on what we are doing we are passing it to the mathematics linear form generator because suppose there is one equation like the summation n running from 0 to infinity n here n is a changing variable 0 is a lower limit and the infinity is the upper limit now while reading this I will read it as the summation n running from 0 to infinity but I want to know when to start when to stop so therefore instead of calling summation I am calling it as a start summation and running from 0 to infinity n summation so it is refining the scope of the summation later on I am passing all these to the android tts which we have developed and we are getting the proper voice output I am displaying some result over here the first one is the simplest equation that is a is equal to pi r square here pi r square we can call we can calculate the square of pi r also because whenever we are just making a statement a is equal to pi r square for the vc a is equal to pi r square he may get impression that we have to calculate the square of pi r but instead of we are supposed to calculate the square of only r so what we are going to do we are trying to insert the parenthesis around the 2 and r so the ocr expression will be a2-pi r raised to 2 so it will be called out as a is equal to pi r r raised to start to end expression the second expression is the square root of a square plus b square here again vc can get impression that the square root is only limited with the a square because whenever I am passing this to the any test-to-speech converter it will called out as a square root of a square plus b square is only limited to the a square so what we are trying to do we are trying to put a bracket between the a square plus b square and later on we are going to calculate the square root of that particular equation so the verbalization will be the start expression square root of start bracket small a raised to start bracket to end bracket plus small b raised to start bracket to end bracket end bracket and the end expression later on the third expression is that is the summation and the we are getting the output as a 2-0 opening bracket a product b2-1 opening bracket b then the closing bracket then there is a colon indicating that there is a end of the scope of the start summation and it will be voiced out as a start expression start summation small a running from 0 to 5 start bracket small a start bracket end summation and end expression thank you. See as we are looking forward to the next our research see as we are aware about there are different OSLMS are available in the market right? But Moodle has different features and unique features which are very much user friendly to visual challenge learners as well as those who are a proper visionary persons so we have suggested we have given some suggestions for the Moodle that there should be a different plugin should be available as which will be a very much customized and unique features for which will be a very user friendly to visual challenge learners and also the compliance should be available screen and cursor magnifiers which we can increase the text and we can screen magnification should be there transcriptions, captions affirmations before sending any assignments then notices while leaving the pages and the most common that is the the connectivity should be there and simplicity like the course networking also audio visual editing should be there and all these features along with the different training is also should be given to the administrators because there are many features are available many versions are coming in the market so maybe about the MOOCs we can give the proper training to these administrators in various institutions and our research will be focused more and more and we can go for the Moodle in the better way so the idea here was we wanted to compare what are the other probabilities as a part of my distance distance learning administrators we offer the people many options which of them they would like to take it it is compulsory for a teacher to go for some such system but need not be necessarily everybody will follow Moodle so they came up with different they came with diverse options and in my experience whenever the students were a small in number like say 200, 300 then the teachers did not prefer to go for Moodle because of the hazards involved in the setting up of that so we settled on the course networking the CN so it is again curiosity of mine can we not simplify our life with Moodle since I know as a CS person Moodle offers you many things the CN may not have those many features there are visa IQ and all also but then customizing to the small scale is also one more thing which would be a requirement now since yesterday though we all are working in CS and working on the Moodle developments and all since many years we also did not know many things what are happening in the word of Moodle so therefore my idea was why not to come up with a MOOC course in a MOOC environment that will tell us about the Moodle happenings and who should use Moodle in which way so another thing was Moodle can be used for the researchers by the researchers see there are certain things where you cannot go for the people and ask them to help they won't generally and therefore research in many areas is lacking see for example to my experts of visual challenging learners to facilitate them language was one of the barriers but availing the Indian language translation itself is a task so how do we go for that then then the thing is in that she came up with a Konkani language translator the linguistic resources are not available so how to generate linguistic resources by providing the crowd sourcing so this is Annie to whom whose story I shared with you in the beginning good morning everyone I come from a land where football is our passion and tourism is our business but a little bit of education happens over there and this is just a bit of research work in Konkani as a language because this language has no script of its own so I was thinking when I came for this Moodle workshop that if I can find some resources of plugging in such kind of things which can incorporate and help people to work with and I have just developed two of things one is a UTF to WX converter and one is a post tag so this type of things we are looking at because the resources in the language like Konkani is very low it's very low and people who know it are even in parts of Kenya you find people who are working with Konkani so we just want to get something so Moodle can be a platform for such plugins thank you so the last part was how to administer the students Moodle site for distance education here is Indraani who work there as an administrator with us and a case study of Idol she will present now I wanted to highlight the points that distance learners face like we are talking generally I teach in a college where it's a blended learning not a distance learning but distance learners have different kinds of issues just discussing the challenges of the distance learners first is we need to know the we don't know the students personally they are in the distance so we need to know their background so for that user profile is system defined so we need to use this custom user profile to add their profiles so that everybody know the teachers during orientation they can know about the backgrounds then we have this study materials problem of study material dispatch where the study materials need to be collected from the contact centers and courier to the remote areas is a problem so we need to monitor them for the moodle wheels very much we can use it for uploading the course materials where they can use it then we can create blogs for the topics we have a problem with the study materials management also like we need to know which teachers are submitting the study materials on time we need to monitor them so that facility I have not have a problem with the study materials we can send notifications as well as this calendar block is there with reminders where we can add the events and set the reminders but this reminder plugin is general like it is not specific to particular courses so that is one problem which we face so task cannot be allotted to teachers it can be allotted but reminders setting is a problem for the students they come only for the examination so we need to orient them so for that the quiz and all the activities we are using here we have this quizzes, we have assignments interactive drag and drop questions all these which we are using okay there is a there is a process of like summative summative grading also but we can improve this we should have the possibility of assigning marks for particular questions here we can do annotations and we can apply the grades so students can if they give a paper that can be uploaded and we can grade it for assessment that privilege is there but nowadays in Mumbai University online assessment for particular question we have the privilege to add marks that I didn't see okay next is okay so we students as co-creators so we can actually if you take the video of the students let them create their own videos they will be very much engaged in the lecture so we have in my college we have used a bridge course we have done a bridge course for digital electronics in which we have taken the students videos and uploaded them we have actually embedded them in Moodle next is for projects for computer science specially we have project documents and we have the deadlines they have to upload the documents proposal then they have to upload the diagrams so we need deadlines for that so we can create folders and they can upload the documents and we can do see the logs next problem is diverse enrollment profile that is we need adaptive learning for that we can use groups for computer science another problem we have is the practicals practicals we cannot conduct online but we have online compilers like we should be able to integrate online compilers with Moodle but that can be done only here with third party we can use a trinket where we can create the code and you can see we can the students can change the code and they can get the output they can see the teachers questions next is for visually challenged ones we are using this accessibility plugin in which there is an 80 bar and we have text to speech we have dictionary we have word prediction tools all these are there everyone is talking anyway I think we need to finish definitely so we have this text to speech in which you can highlight the text and the teacher students can read there is a reader then there is a line spacer there is an intelligent typing facility available for learning disability Dixlexia students we have this special special fonts for Dixlexia in which they have that they think the font moves so here also the font moves and the line it moves I might interrupt I think if anyone wants to see these things maybe you can talk at lunch you can present at lunch I would love to give you an hour but we have other people this is the last slide see thanks for a precious listening there were a lot of enthusiasm there was a lot of enthusiasm and so many things we tried communication was something I am supposed to take 30 minutes so we arranged so many things maybe because of the overwhelming response there was a time cut down but thank you very much for giving us this opportunity and look forward to continue with this thank you very much