The world is turning to online learning and also understanding that it comes with its own problems — like what about those students who don't know how to adapt to it? The process has been made simple for students from classes VI to X of Telangana Social Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society (TSWREIS), Telangana Tribal Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society (TTWREIS), Integrated Tribal Development Agency (ITDA) Bhadrachalam; Telangana Minorities Residential Educational Institutions Society (TMREIS) and Telangana Residential Educational Institutions Society (TREIS) via OAKS (Online Adaptive Knowledge System), the self-learning mobile app by Secundrabad-based Sunitha Infovision, designed to help students make the most of their time while schools are shut.
Sunitha Infovision is a little less than 20 years old in the space of education. Through these years, they have experimented significantly, in the form of their former educational institution — Sunitha Academy — and their former digital classes — Digiclass — via which they reached 2,500 schools. So, it doesn't come as a surprise that OAKS was also set up after an incredible amount of research and development that started about two years ago in May 2018. "We got in touch with RS Praveen Kumar (Secretary of TREIS) in January 2018 for a pilot involving classes XI and XII, where we proposed to coach them to crack the IIT exams. We saw a ten-fold growth in students who made it through. Now, we are partnering with them again via OAKS," says Suman Matcha, Managing Director, Sunitha Infovision.
With their curriculum-aligned content, which is entirely mapped to the State Board, the model is that teachers teach a topic and then, students watch a video on it and take a test. While the video is animated and not over five minutes long, the questions are adaptive in nature and test the understanding of students. The app generates a report detailing how much each student has understood and divides them into different categories. This helps the teacher plan the next class accordingly. "Today, a teacher's time is spent on two primary tasks, report generation and evaluation. We take care of both and allow teachers to concentrate on their main job, teaching," explains the 35-year-old.
The evaluation also includes understanding if the student is good at memorising concepts, in which case they are encouraged to prepare for NEET, or if they are good at logical reasoning, in which case they are encouraged to take up coding and so on. This way, over 250k students across 1,000 residential schools in Telangana have been able to make the most of this app. "In fact, we onboarded one lakh children in six days flat and hired over 100 employees during the lockdown to help us with the process," says the Guntur-born.
OAKS aspires to conduct diagnostic tests via calls to create a unique learning path. "Meaning, we will understand the areas that students are weak in, like basic Math or sentence construction, and the app will add lessons from those subjects to their learning path so that we can bring them up to speed," says Suman, who pursued his Master's Pervasive Computing from West Virginia University before returning to India in 2009. They want to implement diagnostic these tests by July 1.
Introducing you to more of their features:
- Academic calendar: Helps teachers plan the curriculum, term-wise projects and so on
- Teacher empowerment: Even the teachers are provided digital content as per their day plan
- Weekly CCE assessments: It is a multi-dimensional assessment
For more on them, check out youroaks.com
