Karnataka rolls out Learning Management System to digitise education in government colleges

Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa on Monday unveiled the first-of-its-kind digital education initiative for government college students -- Learning Management System (LMS) Karnataka.

It will be rolled out for five lakh students in 430 government first-grade colleges, 87 government polytechnics and 14 government engineering colleges from the academic year 2020-21.

Deputy Chief Minister and Minister for Higher Education Dr Ashwathnarayan called it a revolutionary step in the teaching and learning process in higher education in the country. The open-source platform, developed at Rs 4 crore, will give a leg-up in education to all government college students, providing them access to self-learning and live learning, while gauging the performance of each student, he added.

The department of higher education touted this as a means to bridge the digital divide between the urban and rural students, and private and government institutions.

The platform will have videos of one-hour lectures that take place in classes, PPTs, study material and practice test of 10 multiple-choice questions. The content, both in Kannada and English, has been developed university-wise and subject-wise by the faculty of the Department of Collegiate and Technical Education over the past one month, said Pradeep P, Commissioner for Collegiate Education. The PPT will be a step-up from chalk and board method, he added.

He told The New Indian Express that only the first phase of the platform, developed by a third party in 15 days, has been rolled out at present. In this phase, the login and content access will be given to students and teachers.

Deeming the platform as a medium to close the learning loop with continuous evaluation, he said it has daily and weekly tests and the continuous evaluation works as an effective tool to gauge the capacity and weakness of students and teachers.

The in-built performance analytics will give a picture of teaching-learning outcomes, on student, teacher, college and university at the state level, he said, calling it the "unlocking of the true potential of every student and teacher".

The platform works offline too, as a desktop and mobile app, as well as on the web portal. This is to counter bandwidth and internet issues that were experienced while digitising education during the Covid-19  pandemic.

Last year, over one lakh students were given laptops which have the Windows operating system, and the platform will work on a website-based mode as well.