Meerut, June 22 (KNN) To bridge the gap created in the education system due to sudden switch to online teaching modules from the traditional classroom way of teaching because of Covid-19 crisis, Kanohar Lal Trust Society (KLTS), Meerut based NGO, has implemented EdNirvana – a cloud based Learning Management System (LMS).

Risersoft (www.risersoft.com), one of the promoter group companies of Kanuhar Lal Trust Society, had been working on a corporate Ed-tech solution and started to adapt it early in the lockdown period, working from home, developing the solution over their B2B SaaS app framework.

In May, Risersoft successfully developed EdNirvana (www.ednirvana.com) - which is a cloud based LMS built for enabling a remote learning environment.

Sudden lockdown across the country had a massive impact on all the sectors including the education sector bringing to halt the daily interactions and activities of teachers and students in a classroom environment. “The process to continue spreading education was initiated using WhatsApp to distribute content to students. The content was in the form of YouTube video links, audio conference calls, PDF notes printed or handwritten, self-created videos, online articles, etc. In one of the girls’ degree college, record was maintained in an Excel sheet about various information given and feedback was also taken from students to gauge the effectiveness,”

Dr Neha Sharma, Director Education, KLTS said in a statement.

“While this allowed us to maintain connectivity, concerns started to come up about how students or teachers would be able to retrieve or revisit past content - especially over long periods of time. In a classroom environment, the books and registers, which are made class-wise also serve an important purpose which allow the students to refer systematically during exam time or otherwise,” Dr Sharma opined.

She explained that in WhatsApp groups, the content is more likely to be lost in the long list of messages. Another issue is privacy in adding students to WhatsApp groups since it provides mobile number visibility to each other and even causes parental objections in some cases especially in girls and co-ed colleges.

It is noteworthy that the online solutions available in the market from pre-COVID times are usually content providers, and target students directly. If a college adopts that, one of two things may happen: Either the college gives up control over their curriculum, or they provide their own content to students in addition to the online curriculum – in which case the students may get overloaded. In either case, it affects the school-centric education system as the role of teacher becomes limited and difficult.

This is where LMS has crucial role to play. LMS allows to effectively organize the courses for systematic delivery, retrieval and assessment of content for instructors and learners, even in the absence of physical classes. Many of EdNirvana's features were also driven by KLTS requirements.

EdNirvana offers multiple courses with many instructors and learners for each course. Most of the content is in Hindi. Now the support for vernacular languages has also been built-in.

Keeping in mind that most of the students do not have access to laptops or desktops as they come from economically weaker sections, a mobile app for learners has been made on Android and iOS ensuring optimal data usage.

EdNirvana apps allows downloading of videos and documents to their phones, which can be referred later without incurring additional data usage.

It is difficult to ensure and manage email addresses and passwords of students, especially the younger lot. To solve this, EdNirvana has provision for initial login using mobile phone number and OTP. The content needs to be uploaded by the instructors as they go along the course delivery. Comprehensive capability to create assessments like tests and assignments is built-in and instructors can generate and administer those to learners from time to time. There is support for many types of questions and a question-bank is formed by the system as questions are added. To provide an element of interactivity to the online course delivery, there is also a provision for forums - any learner can create a forum topic and then the students and teachers can comment over it in a participative manner.

Even when the schools and colleges open up, many parents will not like to send their children out of fear of COVID. In such cases, a hybrid model of teaching is required, which is also enabled by this solution, said Dr Sharma.

The initiative is now in the implementation stage. About KLTS: Kanohar Lal Trust Society (www.kanohar.org) is a 52 year old NGO in Meerut, having multiple educational institutions in the city and Sonda village (GZB District). The focus of KLTS is girls’ education - from secondary to Phd levels.