Several government school complexes in Telangana State are looking forward to deploying artificial intelligence (AI) tools to automate several processes such as formative assessments, marking attendance, logging mid-day meals data among others. These AI tools are also looked at as a medium to teach English and other languages at a later stage.

The pilot project of the AI tools will be implemented by the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIITH) in selected school complexes in Moinabad. IIITH has been working closely with select school complex headmasters, resource persons and officials of the Education Department to understand problems at the grass-root level so that they can create AI and other new-age tech solutions to increase opportunities on grassroots.

“We plan to meet the concerned people once again and make specific plans for the technology interventions possible. We want to keep the technologies ready for the coming academic year. These will be short term projects of three to six months that aim to address the issues at the earliest,” said Ramesh Loganathan, Co-Innovation Professor at IIIT-H.

“We observed that a lot of manual work is involved in the data collection and also for feeding the same into the education portal. This data is important but is time-consuming. Our idea is to see how artificial intelligence-based cameras, speech recognition technologies and other tools can be used for marking attendance, midday meals and other activities. For this, we will rope in startups or technology companies that have relevant technologies already. We will build some technologies that are in research,” he said.

The Education Policy 2021 has made a formative assessment of students mandatory. Each week, teachers need to evaluate every class and make a report to gauge the understanding of the students on various lessons. “Experienced teachers can assess who is grasping the content and who is not by observing students’ body language, expressions, attentiveness and the kind of questions they ask in the class. We will use an AI-based camera system and model it to assess the students on these attributes. It can generate a report that the teachers can use to plan additional support for the students who are graded low. The teacher can validate the recommendations and the algorithm will learn from that. The same can also be used for marking attendance,” explained Loganathan.

“We have the technology for teaching spoken languages. So, that is something we have already started building. We are wiring it to the high school curriculum. For each lesson in English, there will be a set of sentences the system will speak and then the class or the individual students will repeat. The system will suggest corrections based on how students perform. The same can be used for other languages also,” concluded Loganathan.