DU is now ready with extensive e-content to supplement and enhance the quality of classroom teaching. The e-lessons, e-lectures, e-quizzes and e-labs — now uploaded on www. illldu.edu. in — will be useful because infrastructure is falling short because of the implementation of OBC quota.
Students entering DU this year will the first batch to have access to e-learning material. The content, developed by the Institute of Lifelong Learning (ILLL) in consulation with ‘‘hundreds of teachers’’. ILLL is already giving out a unique enrolment key to every college which will enable students to access the content in their college initially and on the internet from anywhere at a later stage.
‘‘We have been working on this project for more than two years now. It was initially difficult to convince teachers about the feasibility of this project. But we are now ready with around 150 e-lessons for almost all courses, about 15,000 multiple-choice questions for e-quizzes, about 25 e-labs and six e-lectures. And the work is still on,’’ said professor A K Bakhshi, director, ILLL.
He added, ‘‘Until now, we only followed a talk-and-chalk method in the colleges. But the e-content will help overcome the restrictions of teaching on the blackboard. our aim is to empower teachers not replace them.’’ According to Bakhshi, around 80-100 computers are being given to every colleges under a separate plan which will facilitate in accessing of e-content. It will be available in every college from July on DU intranet. ‘‘But as we increase our bandwidth, the content will be available from anywhere on the internet. Students of any university will be able to use it. The government is anyway running a Rs 6,000 crore project to integrate ICT with higher education,’’ Bakhshi said.
E-lessons: ILLL has created online lessons of different papers across various courses. ‘‘e-lessons are not just online text. It has a lot of value-additions like animations to explain a particular concept. Students can study from diagrams, there are extra tid-bits under ‘Did You Know’. Students can discuss any specific topic, give suggestions and take part in online poll,’’ Bakhshi explained. The content is also not without glamour. After taking permission from the concerned agaency, ILLL has also used Amitabh Bachchan’s voice-over for his father’s poems being taught in the Hindi paper in BA Programme.
E-lectures: Lectures of teachers from different programmes have been recorded live at ILLL studio so that students can keep a track of different chapters beyond the classroom. ILLL selected experienced teachers to deliver lectures on different topics, which can be viewed by students of all colleges. ‘‘The teachers were asked to prepare their lecture in the form of a storyboard,’’ Bakhshi said. Dr Payal Nagpal, who teaches English at Janaki Devi memorial College and co-ordinates conetnt creation at ILLL, added, ‘‘We have interspersed the lectures with powerpoint presentations, pictures and animation to avoid monotony. Many time, we are not able to tell students interesting things beyond the curriculum in a span of 55 minutes. e-Content will solve that problem.
E-quizzes: Students can go for self-assesment by taking these online quizzes. Each quiz will have 25 questions with specified difficuly level. Each wrong answer will be followed by an explanation on why it is not correct. ‘‘We may use these quizzes for giving online assignments to students which can be used for internal assessment,’’ said Dr Amit Sehgal, who teaches physics at Hans Raj College and is currently a fellow at ILLL. Bakhshi added, ‘‘We aim to upload 2000 question every month to create a large database.’’
E-labs: Science studenst can view the animations and live recordings of various experiments on the portal. It is divided into three parts — pre-lab, in-lab and post-lab. ‘‘Students can learn how a particular experiment is done before they walk into the lab. They can know about the requirement, apparatus and precautions to be taken. Otherwise, students do not understand the concept fr many days,’’ said Sehgal who has developed a physcis e-lab for ILLL. From now on, the students will just have to log in and learn.
Source : Times of India June 13 ,2010
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