Problem

Enrollment in primary education in developing countries has reached 91 percent.^[1] 

But 103 million youth worldwide lack basic literacy skills. 6 out of 10 children and adolescents are not achieving a minimum level of proficiency in reading and maths.

Does this sound familiar? Would you like to address this closer home, in your school?  Do you want to know how technology can help solve this?

Herein we present how to meet some of the challenges of modern day K-12 education by IT enabling your school's teaching and learning processes.

At a minimum, this means having -

• a computer lab with curriculum aligned, personalised learning environments on every desktop;
• interactive smart class infrastructure in every classroom that facilitates participation and collaboration from students;
• learning management systems for teachers to curate learning paths for their students and to track their progress;
• and a rich e-library readily accessible to all.

Analysis

But with each of these, one is faced with several challenges. To name a few -

• Delivering an IT enabled nurturing environment to the coaches and learners reliably, consistently, and without a steep adoption curve.
• Ensuring learner and coach engagement, reliable assessments and learning continuity.
• Deploying and maintaining the IT infrastructure without deviating from the core tasks of teaching, safeguarding against obsolescence, scaling as and when needed, yet affordably and at a low total cost of ownership.

Isn’t all this a utopian demand? Hmm...Not at all.

Solution

My sCool Server (MSS), the heart of ICT in Education at a school empowers education infrastructure in unprecedented ways. Let’s explore how.^[2]

It is capable of serving an operating system customised for education, applications and educational content to several users on the local network simultaneously.

99% of all computers deployed over the last decade shall suffice as no-compromise user nodes from an educational computing perspective. Simply put, they get a new lease of life with the MSS.

Computer lab

Connect around 70 client machines on a wired LAN and deploy a computer lab with a system for each student, within minutes.

All users get a login with a fully loaded operating system and around 130+ applications needed to meet the  learning objectives. 

There are around 200 interactive activities supporting early and foundational learning.

Also preloaded is a carefully researched computational thinking curriculum and instructional content for grades 1 to 8. It is extremely helpful to develop logical, analytical and critical thinking skills.

The OS with the applications can be taken along on a “Live USB stick”. It enables you to replicate the same learning environment from your school desktop to that of your home.

The MSS empowers a teacher. It enables her to remotely monitor and assist her students. It facilitates broadcasting of lessons to all screens. The teacher can also fully manage all students’ systems from her desk.

It helps you achieve the digital literacy, coding and computational thinking objectives outlined in the National Education Policy 2020.

Smartclass

Now it is the turn of the classroom.

Install an inexpensive MSS-Smart Class (MSS-SC) node in every classroom. Pair it with a projector, white-wall and an inexpensive graphics tablet with a stylus in the hands of a teacher and we have an interactive smart class. This lends mobility to a teacher around the classroom and also facilitates collaboration amongst the students.

The solution is preloaded with several world-class open educational resources (OERs) and supports hosting of custom content and assessments. All the content is accessible offline and can be incrementally updated through offline and online methods.

There is a world class learning management system (LMS) which is extremely easy for teachers to use for their lesson planning.

If educational resources and exercises are the pearls then the LMS serves as the thread that empowers a teacher to stitch them into personalised learning paths for her students. The assessment and reporting modules of the LMS serve as the guiding light for a teacher to plan the corrective interventions for her students.

When paired with a wireless network and tablets, it facilitates self-paced learning and digital assessment of students.

Digital library

With inexpensive WiFi access points across the school, students with handheld devices can access the e-library from the MSS. It houses thousands of pre-loaded knowledge resources from around the world and can also be extended with your school’s content.

Such an environment is excellent to simulate online research projects without exposing the children to the risks of the Internet where complex and expensive safeguards for filtered access may not be feasible.

With a robust and secure infrastructure powered by the MSS, evolve with confidence to comprehensive digital learning.

Monitoring and MIS

Performance can’t be measured without metrics.

The MSS has in-built usage tracking and health monitoring. The tracking can be customised to varying granularity. It can track how much content has been covered and usage of software on a per user basis. Such data is a gold mine for all stakeholders and especially for our teachers.

This helps establish accountability of all stakeholders as well as delegates the task of maintenance to the experts, thus allowing the school staff to concentrate on the educational processes.

Benefits

The benefits of the MSS are manifold.

It helps deploy a robust, reliable and yet no less flexible and scalable IT infrastructure at a school that ensures a consistent experience each and every time.

The MSS provides the foundation for making each learning environment extremely engaging, personal and productive for our children. It establishes learning continuity from one session to another and from school to home. It is outcome oriented as it objectively captures and presents key metrics.

The MSS team is constantly striving to ensure that the platform and content is available in multiple languages. This makes it increasingly useful in all regions.

The MSS brings together proven open source technologies and readily available high quality hardware into a seamless package which caters to all core technological needs of schools. This safeguards against vendor lock-in and ensures the longevity of your investment.

Though its impact in the teaching and learning process is immediate, its adoption to realize its full potential may be gradual, non-intrusive and is without a steep learning curve.

And now the best part for some - With the MSS, the overall tangible costs of deploying the ICT infrastructure is reduced by at least 40% and owning it is 60% cheaper, when compared to any other solution delivering similar outcomes. Thus it has an overall low total cost of ownership. Cost benefits in terms of time saved familiarizing, deploying and maintaining a mix of complex technologies is incalculable.

Thus with the My sCool Server, we effectively address Expansion, Equity, Experientiality and Excellence in education.

Action

Visit www.myscoolserver.com to know more.

Technical Specification

Computer Lab Solution

Hardware

For 15 / 20 users computer lab powered by MSS and fat-clients for distributed computing :

Software

A customised operating system for education built atop a world renowned, reliable and secure OS - Ubuntu.

Educational software

• IT tools to suit computer curriculum in concurrence with NCERT, CBSE and multiple state boards. Has  a Computational Thinking curriculum as prescribed in NEP 2020.
• More than 200 interactive activities and 130 applications supporting foundational to grade 12 learning objectives. Applications such as Geogebra, Libreoffice, Synfig Studio, Tupi, Scratch, GCompris, Tux Math, Tux Paint, MyPaint, Klavaro, Sugar and many more are installed. More details attached in Annexure 1 and available at this link - https://bit.ly/mssfele .
• Support for teaching and learning all current day programming structures and languages and database concepts.
• Future ready to support STEM and robotics based curriculum.  
• Customisable with installation of application and educational software or school related software as deemed necessary.

Performance, Compatibility & Scalability

• Scalable to power up to 70 diskless clients simultaneously using the same server.
• Legacy systems can be used as clients (minimum – Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM, Fast Ethernet, no storage)
• Unlimited login and desktop for each learner ensures learning personalisation, continuity and performance tracking.
• Take home, on a USB pen drive, the OS and all software for practice on any computer accessible.

Training & Assessment

• Facilitates offline, self-paced teacher training with pre-loaded multilingual training material from IIT Bombay’s spoken-tutorial.org in Hindi, English and regional languages.
• Provides platform specific on-demand training with offline available training and reference modules.
• Integrated Learning Management System facilitates tracking of learner progress and robust assessments.

Multilingual Desktop & Content

• Multilingual learning environment supporting several languages via Devanagari, English (Latin) fonts and  fonts supporting regional Indian languages.
• Sideload any multimedia content or assessments in the multilingual LMS for designing custom lessons or simply serve as an offline digital library.
• Update content and assessments dynamically over the internet.

Health Tracking, Monitoring & Support

• Student monitoring, remote guidance and lesson broadcasting tool integrated to assist a teacher
• Track application & device usage as well as its health for administrative MIS :

• Status of Server, Client ‐‐ ON/OFF at any point of time
• Duration for which a Client was ON
• Duration for which content of server was accessed by Client
• Duration for which each user engaged with each application and / or educational content
• Record of past issues and alerts for problems that may happen in the future, thus enabling timely action and high uptime

•  Tool infrastructure to provide instant troubleshooting support remotely over a 3G hotspot or dongle.

MIS and Content Cloud Server

• The MIS cloud server helps collect crucial health and performance metrics of all devices
• The content cloud server helps push content updates, assessments and collect results of students

Compliance, Licensing, Certification

• Built on top of world class open-source components such as Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and supporting educational software that is well known for its security and robustness.
• Though the solution completely works offline, it is inherently safe from virus and malware attacks even when connected to the internet.
• Technical and Security Certifications - https://ubuntu.com/security/certifications

NB: It is possible to deliver a similar, but only a partial experience on the Windows Multi-point Server operating system. A Windows based solution shall need a far more powerful and expensive server.

Smart Class Solution

Hardware

For an interactive white board based smart class :

Superior Interactivity and Engagement

• Allows mobility to teacher around the class facilitated by wireless graphics tablet
• No shadow of teacher on the projected screen, thus clear viewing for all students
• Facilitates participation and engagement of students from their desk
• Converts any white-wall into an interactive white-board

Software

A customised operating system for education built atop a world renowned, reliable and secure OS - Ubuntu.

Teaching Aids and Educational Software

• World-class, feature rich white board software Openboard (openboard.ch) with practical teaching aids
• Capture screen while teaching for future reference and reuse
• Teaching aids in the form of interactive simulations, software and videos for science and maths (For e.g. Geogebra, PhET, Arvind Gupta, Walter Fendt, etc.)
• World class OERs pre-loaded for reference usage by teachers (For e.g. Khan Academy, CK-12, etc.)

Pedagogical and Assessment Tools

• Simple yet powerful Learning Management System that works in offline-first mode
• Preloaded with curriculum mapped content in multiple state languages
• Facilitates offline content organisation and custom lesson planning
• Ability to sync content from a central cloud server when online
• Conduct assessments of students over a WiFi network
• Push results to a central cloud server for tracking and MIS at block, district and state level
• Facilitates self-paced, blended and/or inverted classroom learning models
• Dedicated login and personalised account for each teacher and student

MIS and Content Cloud Server

• The MIS cloud server helps collect crucial health and performance metrics to monitor the overall progress of the project
• The content cloud server helps push content updates, assessments and collect results of students

Health Tracking, Monitoring & Support

• Track application & device usage as well as its health for administrative MIS :

• Status of Server ‐‐ ON/OFF at any point of time
• Duration for which content of server was accessed
• Duration for which teacher engaged with each application and / or educational content
• Record of past issues and alerts for problems that may happen in the future, thus enabling timely action and high uptime

•  Tool infrastructure to provide instant troubleshooting support remotely over a 3G hotspot or dongle.

NB: It is possible to deliver a similar, but partial experience on the Windows operating system, by using a more powerful and expensive content and learning server.