Smart Study System

 ABSTRACT

             As we are well aware of the fact that the role of online education has become essential due to current hazards of pandemic since 2020.

            On the other side, the quest for online education is caused by the paradigm shift due to the advancement in the technology and its effectiveness.

            Academic institutions all over the world have planned to carry on academic activities using online resources. These resources are equipped with latest required tools and provided with the convenience for the academic institutions as well as for the learners and facilitators.

            The use of online academic applications has become the first most features of academic institutions. Almost all the academic institutions have switched towards the use of existing online educational platforms. These platforms are equipped with suitable, flexible, commonly used tools having online attendance, classroom recording, file sharing, shared or collaborated storage for uploading large files, white board, conducting MCQ based tests, conceptual and theoretical exams, multiple screen grid-view, audio and visual aids as well. These resources are available free of cost and plugins, 3^rd party tools are available online to get these features integrated with the online sessions.

            Microsoft team, zoom, google meet, skype, any-desk are few examples of the abovementioned platforms. Most of the academic institutions around the globe are using these platforms very smoothly. Besides that, the customized Learning Management Systems like Moodle, Graphy by Unacademy are also available free of cost. The existing online resources are very helpful in order to conduct online classes; hence they are not providing full support for integration with any Information System, maintained by Academic Institutions locally. The security level of these existing online platforms is not capable to provide essential features of data privacy and data integrity. Someone from the organization can easily delete the shared material as the data and files were shared with the group of people. Data security and reliability is a question for these existing online educational platforms.

            The traditional Academic or Campus management system is mainly comprised of Admissions, Enrollment, Selection and finalization of subjects i.e. elective and optional, fee submission, online vouchers, banks as 3^rd party for online payment, conducting exams both for theory and practical, conducting surveys for feedback, get in touch with the parents and many more. Physical and virtual vigilance is also provided using AI tools.

 

DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT – SMART STUDY

 

            The process of educating the people with their desired pace and ease is very challenging, various mechanisms are proposed and are being used for the same purpose and the demand of non-traditional form of education is getting wider is scope and it has become challenge for the developers of Pervasive computing applications to develop universally acceptable environment, equally equipped with all the features. To meet the challenge in chunks, various solutions are proposed and developed as discussed earlier.

            We have discussed the features of free online platforms for educational purposes; they are not fully functional and trustable. However we can customize them, but still they are not desirable by most of the academic institutions. Academic institutions don’t want to share the personal information of their students, their pictures, exam and result information, their attendance and fee information as well.

            There were always a need of secure, reliable, trustable, customizable, fully functional web or mobile based academic management system. Our proposed project is primarily comprised of the desired functions as well as the features provided by the platforms which are available freely. This proposed project will be a complete deployment of Learning Management System LMS as well as Campus Management System, having certain customizable features for conforming the Academic and Administrative procedures.

            The proposed online Smart Study System will preferably available as web based application, having the following features:

·        User can create an academy online which will give user whole platform for his own academy.

o   The proposed SSS will be a customizable platform, each Academic institution will be able to manage their resources. These resources will be created by the institutions and will be used by the users. The resources will be classrooms, courses offered, admissions, timetable and schedule of classes, attendance, exams, result preparation activities and many more.

o   As an individual academic institute, the online applicant will be allowed to enroll as student, opt the subjects, courses of their own choice, online payment procedures, date sheet preparation and access to all the resources available.

o   The facilitators-teachers will be able to create their virtual classrooms and allowed the enrolled students-learners only to get access to the class. The facilitators will be able to conduct meetings, start and end a class session. These virtual classrooms will be fully functional and protected from any illegal access.

o   The special feature of vigilance, attendance system integrated with AI based will be a special advantage. The AI based image processing system will capture the real time images and after mapping with the system images, the attendance of the students will be marked.

o   This academy will contain all the basic features required for teachers, students and academy owners need to earn, teach and study.

PROJECT BACKGROUND/OVERVIEW

 

            The proposed project will be a web-based, customizable, fully functional, secure and reliable application. This Smart Study System will allow the power user of an Academic Institution to add the required resources to the web portal. These resources will be available on the dashboard or admin panel of the portal.

ü  The power user will be able to login and create session with a proper username / password given to him after subscribing.

ü  The power user will be prompted to enter complete name of the Academic Institute, Address and contact information.

ü  Vision and Mission Statement of the Academic Institution

ü  The official Logo and monogram will be added.

ü  The power user will be able to create other admin users.

ü  The power/admin users will be able to:-

§  Create Admission form (customizable template will be available)

§  Manage standard of the class i.e. Annual/Semester based.

§  Create new Classes

§  Create new Departments.

§  Create new Subjects, maximum and pass marks/ credit hours, theory/practical

§  Create new Courses, duration, passing criteria, fee for the courses.

§  Add New Teachers and Non-Teaching staff, their designation and departments.

§  Roles for employees.

§  Assigning roles to the employees.

§  Assigning classes to Teachers/Facilitators

§  Process the admission forms.

§  Allocating standard resources for classes.

§  Suspending classes

§  Revoking users.

ü  Attendance of the class participants will be evaluated using AI based system. Face recognition system based on Digital image processing will be used. This mechanism will be capable of recognizing the actual student.

ü  While conducting classes, the eye contact of a learner will be captured by eye gazing technology, which will help the system to capture the interest level of the viewer.

ü  Online quizzes

ü  Assignments and presentations

ü  Simulation based practical

ü  Online Digital Library

ü  Corpus of Audio/Video based material

ü  Managing Accounts and Payroll systems

ü  Managing Bank Accounts

ü  Managing Expenses

ü  Future work

o   Auto grading of the exams, theory/ practical

 

PROBLEM STATEMENT

            Academic institutions, using freely available, groupware applications for teaching and learning purposes are not perfectly satisfied with these. They have to use dual systems for overall administrative procedures as there is not a single application available free of cost to provide teaching and administrative features. The data uploaded to these freely available groupware are also at high risk.

            These groupware applications are designed to meeting the numerous requirements, but not the exact requirements of any single institute. Academic Institute may require certain certificates for the students and issue them as and when required.

            Student may require Academy/ School / College / University student admit card, school/college leaving certificate, course completion certificate, official and unofficial result card, bona-fide student letter, Language proficiency certificate and many others.

            Employees recruitment letters, appraisal letters, acknowledgement certificates are also required by the academic institutions.

PROJECT SCOPE

            Not a single online platform which is freely available for teaching and learning purposes, providing support for all type and levels of academic institutions. There is a diversity exist between schools, colleges and universities. They have their own set of requirements. These requirements are not met exactly by almost all the platforms freely available on the internet.

            The scope of our proposed project is viable and vibrant. The resources are available as sandbox and any academic institute may use the available features according to their exact requirements.

            Our project is specially designed to meet the certain features which are not available in the existing freely available platforms.

            Privacy, security and reliability are the strong feature of our Smart Study System. Every activity will be properly executed and reliably completed with encryption.

            The facility of hybrid classrooms will be available. The teacher-facilitator will be able to add the audio/visual material for the learners.

            Online digital library will be available for the learners and facilitators to get the available resources.

BACKGROUND OF THE PROJECT - REVIEW LITERATURE

SMART CLASSROOMS

            Beside other benefits of Pervasive Computing and rapid advancement in communication technology, consequently smart class rooms are introduced with robust features of high level connectivity, resource sharing, portability of data among different devices and context awareness.

The Smart Classroom is a resource, equipped with connectivity, interactivity, share-ability, reliability, monitor-ability, convenience, vigilance, situation awareness for the learners and instructors using that classroom.

It enhances the process of collaborative learning. Such environment is suitable for managing small groups of students and colleagues for problem solving. Desktop Computer/Smartphones/laptops are used in this type of learning environment which are specially designed and situation aware mechanism is embedded. The standard computing device automatically connected with mobile ad-hoc network for discussions. These devices like Smartphones have the capability to monitor its location, temperature, light and motion or mobility and uses this information to initiate the process of communication between the instructor and learners to share their data and information in automatic behavior. Middleware is used to address the context awareness effectively, also provides runtime support like reconfiguration, maintenance to the application software. In most of the smart class rooms, reconfigurable context sensitive Middleware (RCSM) is used for auto maintenance.

Background of Collaborative Computing while educating the people

            Collaborative learning provides sophisticated conducive environment so that the facilitator can get involves the learners in doing their assigned task and analyzing the activities they are carrying out. Collaborative learning is very effective mode of sharing knowledge and supports the students for active participation in the learning process. Every student can learn from everyone else and no one can be denied to making contributions to others. There are 4 general characteristics of collaborative classrooms.

Knowledge Sharing

            The facilitator possesses comprehensive knowledge of the contents of the course, required skills and valid effective set of instructions and such information is provided to the student, participating in the group. The teacher also builds upon the facts, practical experiences, mode of sharing, strategies to motivate the learners to get into the environment.

Ability of Sharing

            These collaborative classrooms are specially designed where the facilitator paves the students’ way in sharing their persons knowledge, ensures that every student is participating actively and sharing his/her knowledge and experience of doing that so, which consequently pays back high levels of understanding.

Mediation

            The term facilitator is used for the teacher as teacher has to be more effective and productive who acts as mediators for adjusting the level of information sharing and helps the students to browse new information to their experiences and for learning in various areas.

Heterogeneity

            Various groups of learners can be benefitted by collaborative learning. Due to the heterogeneous attributes of collaborative computing, various groups of students enrich learning in collaborative learning process as the perspective, experiences and background of all students plays essential role for enriching the learning process.

            The first two attributes corresponds to the connection between the learner and facilitator in the collaborative environment. The third characteristic introduces the novelty in lecture delivery. The fourth attribute is the environment which is heterogeneous in nature. All of these characteristics are increased manifolds in the smart classrooms. 

Robust Features of Smart Classroom

            Reconfigurable Context Sensitive Middleware (RCSM) facilitates the learning process in collaborative classrooms. It acts as middleware for pervasive computing applications. The smart classrooms are equipped with several devices which are categorized in 2 parts, infrastructure – devices and mobile – devices. In each classroom, the infrastructure – devices are categorized as stationary and provide the required information to the mobile – devices, such as the relative locations of the mobile devices with respect to those of the infrastructure – devices and light intensity of the classroom. The devices with mobility features, belongs to the students and the instructor. By using mobile devices, the facilitator and learner may interact actively between themselves in a classroom.

            Smartphones and laptops are used as mobile device while implementing the aforesaid architecture. The infrastructure – devices normally consists of PCs and PDAs with location and light detection intensive features. These 2 types of devices use different collaborative applications with RCSM. The characteristic of collaborative learning that facilitates the Smart Classroom is described below.

Organizing Transient Communication groups

            To facilitate collaborative learning in Smart Classrooms, group discussion has been proved as the essential functionality. Keeping in view the current parameter, like location of the classroom, schedule of the class and availability of other group members available in the vicinity, the PDAs are used in classrooms which may develop device groups so that the learners can contribute in class exercises. As soon as the group forming status is no longer active, these device groups also dissolved. The facilitator’s PDA gains the access to any student group for monitoring purposes and to evaluate the progress well in time, consequently generates feedbacks during class exercises.

Situation – Aware Interaction between PDAs

            Keeping in view the features of Smart Classrooms, the instructor can use RCSM in PDAs for situation aware interaction among them. As per their desired situations, PDAs can share useful information after detecting other devices. For instance, during the start of the class the instructors PDA searches for students’ PDAs and after detecting them in classrooms, the relevant desired material like lecture slides are distributed to the devices connected to the classroom session as instructor desired to start the lecture by dimming the light if the projector is in use.

Features of Smart Classroom Application Package

            The applications which are used in Smart Classroom are specially designed to facilitate collaborative learning process. This smart classroom application package has built in collaborative learning features for learners, instructors and teaching assistants. The package also provides communication features among students, instructors and teaching assistants. The detail of Smart Classroom features are described below.

            The application suite has vigilance capability and generates alarms and message alerts to students for his/her home assignments, schedule of the class in accordance with the current time and location. All the relevant lecture materials are synchronized between PDAs and desktop computer, before and after the class.

            As portable devices are to be synchronized with the desktop computer which contain the original lecture materials, the application package synchronizes the lecture material between the devices of instructor or teaching assistant.

            In order to make communication possible the application package is used to exchange and share the documents by drawing and these documents can be synchronized among the PDAs of students.

Communication channel for Teaching Assistant to Students

a) The smart classroom application package provides the facility of sharing educational material i.e. lecture notes, course schedule, grade sheets, survey forms between the instructor and the students. This distribution can be scheduled periodically or at the beginning of a class.

b) The instructor has also primary concern with preparing and conducting exams for student groups with the provided features of the application.

Student to Instructor communication

a) The application suite facilitates students to record their questions or requirements in text format in their PDAs. As soon as the TA or instructor switches to the classrooms, the answers of the questions being asked by the students are generate and transferred to the TA’s PDA.

b) Students can also submit the requisite progress report using the application suite. At the end of each class session, the reports are automatically submitted to the TA of the relevant class.

c) Appointments can also be made by sending the request to the instructor’s PDAs and acknowledged by receiving confirmation message by the application suite.

d) Students can submit their answers of the questions during the exams and the answers will be automatically available to the TAs.

e) Students are provided with the facility of having their homework displayed on the PDAs and project to the screen.

RCSM for Classroom organization

            The role of Reconfigurable Context – Sensitive Middleware is very important for carrying out the communication between the participants. Devices may have different types of sensors. The PDAs of the students dynamically invokes the features of mobile ad hoc networks consisting on proximity and specific contexts like location of the device, intensity of the light to address any problem collaboratively. The application software is specially designed for cross platform and contain hybrid features for different programming languages, PDAs and mobile ad hoc networking protocols.

1. Application Development Framework

            A special application development framework is proposed in RCSM for the development of situation aware application software. A specially designed situation – aware interface definition language is used to elaborate the properties and characteristics of application object for situation awareness. It separates the application object into a situation aware interface and a situation independent object implementation. For a specific application object, a custom made situation analyzer can be generated as per the specifications of SA – IDL. The role of the situation analyzer is to perform necessary analysis of the situation on behalf of an application object. 

Request Broker Object

Various run time services are facilitated by RCSM Object Request Broker (R-ORB).

i. Data Acquisition according to situation

            Various sources are used to collect run time situation as required by the situation aware applications.  The requisite resources may be retrieved locally or remotely as desired. Accessing these resources remotely, periodic retrieval of situation is essentially required. R-ORB is specially developed for attaining the requisite facility. Various ad hoc group settings and point to point settings are used to exchange information with remote applications as it is the core requirement of situation aware application to perform the required tasks properly.

ii. Communication Management:

            The robust feature of R-ORB is the use of lightweight framework over mobile ad hoc network for connecting distributed and mobile situation aware application objects transparently. The significant feature of R-ORB is to establish connection with devices for a short period of time, falling in the vicinity and senses these devices frequently and analyzing efficiently the situation readiness of specific application object and its relevant communication partners. R-ORB also provides very lightweight client server communication primitive for the application objects to makes communication possible with stationary or enterprise computing resources

 TOOLS AND LANGUAGE

 VISUAL STUDIO CODE/ VISUAL STUDIO

 JAVASCRIPT- IMAGE PROCESSING

JS Libraries CAMERA API etc.