About ELMS
National Education Society for Tribal Students or “NESTS”, as an autonomous Society has been set up under the Ministry of Tribal Affairs to establish, endow, maintain, control and manage the schools and to do all acts and things necessary for or conducive to the promotion of Eklavya Model Residential School (EMRS). EMRS are set up in the States/UTs under EMRS Scheme of MoTA, Govt. of India with the following objectives:
• In the context of trend of establishing quality residential schools for the promotion of education and also to ensure all round development of tribal students belonging to different areas, habitations and diversified environment throughout the country, the Eklavya Model Residential Schools (EMRSs), Eklavya Model Day Boarding Schools (EMDBS) and Centre of Excellence for Sports are being established for ST and PVTG students.
• The schools are aimed to provide quality upper primary, secondary and senior secondary level education to ST and PVTG students in tribal dominated areas, along with extra-curricular activities, to enable them to access the best opportunities in education and to bring them at par with the general population.
About ELMS-LMS
The system will provide a tablet based comprehensive learning environment for students. EMRS-LMS will have any type of content like pdf, audio, video, online labs, etc. The students can access these study materials from the tablet using EMRS-LMS Android App. The study material / course content will be preloaded into the device initially. The EMRS-LMS App content will also periodically updated from EMRS-LMS Portal as needed on availability of internet connection. EMRS-LMS Android application will consist of teacher notes, NCERT/Stateboard textbooks/videos, and Online Lab Content. EMRS-LMS is also available in Hindi language.
Major Components of EMRS-LMS
An effective learning environment requires attention to the following three components.
A. Offline Content
Given the remote locations and the consequent poor network connectivity for most of the students, access to content offline is important. Most of these can be pre-loaded on the device; however, since the content will be standard specific, this has challenges from that angle. Most of the content for a standard can be made available in the beginning; however, some additional content may be added along the way. Currently we anticipate content would comprise eBooks (pdfs), video content, HTML5 content like online Labs. A solution called e-basta is already available which can facilitate this. Ebasta has a portal which can host books and other content, and an e-basta Android app can be installed on tablets for locally hosting the content in an easy to access form. The architecture of eBasta is such that interfaces for different types of contents can be provided from eBasta in a seamless manner to the student irrespective of location of file, format of file and associated player. eBasta App will ensure easy single point access to all contents.
B. Live Classes
Though regular live classes are not feasible for most of the students in the target audience, we feel some provision for periodic online sessions must be made. This could be once a week or so. For this, a video conferencing application is required on the device. Options such as Zoom, Googlemeet, jitsi, Big Blue Button (BBB), etc can be considered for this. Usually these require an app on the device, which is freely available for download, and a reasonable network connectivity on the device. The app can be pre-loaded on the device, once finalised. We are proposing use of Big Blue Button (BBB) software for Live classes requirement, which will be integrated with Moodle. BBB is open source video conferencing software that provides sophisticated features like breakout rooms, online polls,collaborative whiteboard and is tightly integrated with Moodle. The live sessions conducted using BBB can be recorded and will be available for access on Moodle LMS.
C. Interaction and Feedback
This is an essential part of any teaching learning process. What can be expected is a provision for students to post their questions/doubts online with the teacher or peers answering them asynchronously, teacher specified assignments to be completed and uploaded to the LMS portal, quizzes to be set up on the portal for review and feedback, etc. A typical LMS provides all these and no extra effort would be required. We are proposing using the popular LMS Moodle with a large community support for this. The Moodle android app will provide access to discussion forums, chats, polls, assignments, tests, communication with teachers and peers, access to live sessions, access to recording sessions, etc. Some functions can also be done offline in Moodle.