Usage Scenarios
It is easier to convey the idea of what Sri Sathya Sai Vidya Vahini intends to achieve, by describing in detail the kinds of uses that we envisage for the project. Here is a list of usage scenarios that we have thought of.It should be borne in mind that we cater to two distinct sets of demographics using Vidya Vahini teachers and students from well established schools and volunteers who have easy access to the internet – this group will be content generators for the site; and students and teachers from less endowed schools who will primarily be recipients of the content.
Many of the features may look too advanced (even frivolous) for a rural setting, but these are important to encourage the urban children, teachers and youth to use the site for generating content. This is part of our stated mission that teaching, learning and volunteering should be an enjoyable experience. All these features are planned with one and only one goal in mind – the rural teacher should have access to abundant, high quality material and support so as to make his/ her task of teaching rural India a fulfilling one.
- Scenario 1: Content Upload
- Scenario 2: Online Assignment
- Scenario 3: Interesting Discussion in Class: Forum
- Scenario 4: Assessment Quiz
- Scenario 5: Thought for the week : Role play inter-school competition.
- Scenario 6: Epiphany
- Scenario 7: Difficult topic; External link validation and caching
- Scenario 8: Mnemonics (annotations/ highlights) – share notes
- Scenario 9: Common text book project
- Scenario 10: Bulk Printing , sponsored
- Scenario 11: Penalty – community service
- Scenario 12: Multiple users
- Scenario 13: student progress reports and comments
- Scenario 14: Teacher pooling
Scenario 1 : Content Upload
School : Any School
User : Teacher
Level : Basic
The school uploads its content in the electronic form.
- Text & multimedia content
- Model answer sheets
- Stotras
- Speeches
- Dance lessons
- Martial arts Training material
- Role play videos for inter-school competitions
2) Guru Poornima is approaching. The students at SSSHSS Prasanthi Nilayam have started practicing the Guru Stotras. The Music Group incharge decides to record the practice sessions at the school prayer hall and upload the audio and the text of the stotras on the SSSVIP site.
All music teachers get an automated mail that a new music update has been made. The music teacher at SSS Vidya Vihar, Indore, decides to download some stotras and make the students at the school practice those.
Scenario 2 : Online Assignment
School : Established School
User : Teacher, Student
Level : Basic
Features needed:
Assignment module, un-edited version upload by student, edit and verification by teacher, tag with appropriate topic/ sub-topic.
Scenario 3 : Interesting Discussion in Class: Forum
School : Established School
User : Teacher
Level : Basic
Features needed:
Full syllabus online expandable to the smallest sub-topic/ sub-unit. Facility for adding discussion topic.
Ability to treat a comment in the discussion topic as a new thread in the teachers’ forum.
A teacher in SSSVV, Indore is teaching the VIII class as usual and one of the students asks a tangential question. The teacher responds with a counter question open to the whole class and an interesting discussion ensues. After class, the teacher logs on, navigates down to the sub-topic she was teaching, clicks on the ‘discussion’ link and types in a brief account of the inspiring discussion. The comment is automatically saved along with the sub-topic but is also treated as new thread in the teachers’ discussion forum. In Visakhapatnam, a teacher logs on to her computer from her home at night and sees a new discussion topic tagged with the subject that she teaches. She opens it and reads – is reminded of a similar anecdote on the same topic and replies to the discussion thread.
Scenario 4 : Assessment Quiz
School : Established School
User : Teacher
Level : Basic Feature, medium level content aggregation
Features needed:
Question bank, marking/ grading etc.
Scenario 5 : Thought for the week : Role play inter-school competition
School : Multiple
User : Teachers in-charge of TFW
Level : Medium
Features needed:
Support for video upload/ download and voting.
Scenario 6 : Epiphany
School : NA
User : Balvikas Guru, Subject Teacher
Level : Basic
Kekule’s dream…
A young bal vikas guru in Mumbai who is also pursuing her MSc in Chemistry at the moment is reading some course material as usual. In the organic chemistry chapter, she happens to read about Kekule’s dream – how he was trying to solve the problem of the molecular structure of benzene, fell asleep and dreamed of a snake eating its own tail. He woke up with a start and wrote down the structure of benzene.
The bal vikas guru is thrilled by the story. She was to talk about the role of intuition in the class on the following day. She thinks this story of Kekule’s dream is a perfect example of how God helps by giving insight to anyone who has been working hard. She logs on to SSSVV, opens up the Group three lesson plan and types in the story of Kekule’s dream in the sub-topic ‘Role of Intuition’. She also adds a tag ‘chemistry – IX class’. Automatically, all chemistry teachers get a mail about a new content that has been added to IX Class chemistry. A teacher in Phoolgaon has never heard of this story and on reading this immediately tags this article to his lesson plan on organic chemistry – aromatic rings sub-topic.
Features needed:
Login and connectivity (via internet) for bal vikas gurus
Balvikas lesson plans online and permission for balvikas gurus to update lesson plans
Option for bal vikas gurus to tag bal vikas topics with main stream curriculum(class wise)
Option for subject teachers to incorporate bal vikas material to lesson plan.
Scenario 7 : Difficult topic; External link validation and caching
School : Rural school
User : Two Teachers, systems administrator
Level : Medium
Subject: Geography
Sub-Topic: Eclipse
A teacher from a rural school finds it difficult to explain “why there are no eclipses on every new moon and full moon day”. She logs on, drills down to the sub-topic, clicks on ‘difficult question’ and types in the question.
This question becomes a part of the ‘discussion’ for that sub-topic, and also starts a new thread on the forum; mails are sent automatically to all X class geography teachers that a new question has been put up. A teacher from SSSVV, Vizag, logs on and sees the question and decides to provide an answer to the question as to how the plane of the moon’s orbit is at a tilt of 5.1 degrees to the elliptic of the earth’s orbit around the Sun. She also gives a link to this page on the internet to illustrate her point
http://www.hermit.org/eclipse/why_cycles.html
The system Administrator team gets an update that an external link has been added to a discussion; checks the link; makes arrangements to make that page available ‘offline’ too by caching it. Next time there is a ‘dump’ to the local servers, this page will also be saved on the local servers of the school. (This would be subject to examining the copyright issues related to the content)
Scenario 8 : Mnemonics (annotations/ highlights) – share notes…
User : Student
Level : Medium
Features needed
Facility to edit pages and save as personal version.
Rationale: Allow the student to use the site as if he/ she uses a textbook.
Scenario 9 : Common text book project
School : Multiple schools
User : Subject teachers from all schools, EHV overseers, Editorial team, Copyright domain experts,
Level : Advanced
Features needed
Collaborative editing, task scheduling, Page formatting, etc
Scenario 10 : Bulk Printing , sponsored
School : Group of rural schools
User : Multiple
Level : Advanced
Rural schools that are in need of additional learning material like guidebooks, question banks etc should be able to requisition the same. A prospective benefactor would have a view of available avenues for helping. A tie-up with a mass printing and delivery website will convert the digital content into print form and deliver the specified no. of copies to the destination school as arranged by the contributor.
Scenario 11 : Penalty – community service
School : Any school
User : Principal, student, distant teacher
Level : Advanced
A student comes late to school. He has already been warned earlier and now it calls for penalty! The principal tells him that he will be expected to do community service to atone for the lack of respect for the discipline for school timings. He must forward to the principal a certificate for 5 seva points from the Vidya Vahini system. The principal adds the name of the student in the penalty list and the number of points expected from him.
The student logs in and searches for a seva that would give him 5 points. He sees that a there are lots of un-translated new material and since he is good at Hindi, decides to take up five pages of a history question and answer for the VIII class for translation. Those 1500 words would give him the required 5 tentative points.
He clicks on the page. Clicks on the translate menu and selects Hindi. Translates the five pages and saves the page (which gets saved as an un-edited version, subject to review by the teacher). Automatically a seva certificate is generated which he forwards to the principal.
Simultaneously, a mail is sent to all history teachers from Hindi medium schools (e.g. the SSS Gramin Jagriti school) and also designated non-teacher Hindi experts that a new page has been translated. Once the teacher approves and rates the translation, the pages become ‘edited’ and is visible to every one and also the tentative points are converted into actual points and his penalty is deemed to be completed successfully. Also the student’s eligibility points for Hindi translation tasks is upgraded to that extent.
Features needed:
Connectivity to main server from the participating school.
An easy method for the principal / any teacher to assign penalty projects and quantify the task.
A method to assign points for each task based either on difficulty, or time consumed or demand.
A search facility to search for tasks for which the student is eligible.
Scenario 12 : Multiple users
Type : Extended Content development
An Example – Dramatization
First, the regular academic content on respiration is available to the teachers. EHV teachers trained in bringing out the value orientation, also connect the topic to relevant values by scripting a roleplay scenario.
Rahul and Nakul are brothers. One day after school, they were walking back home…..
Rahul- Nakul, Today our Science teacher told us some interesting facts on breathing…we take 20,600 breaths per day… while resting, we breathe 12-15 times per minute and the rate of breathing in women and children are more than men…
Nakul- Very interesting indeed…..Today in our class, we discussed the relationship between emotions and breathing…tell me. How do you breathe when you are angry?
Rahul- Very fast….taking short breaths.
Nakul- Yes…and when you are sad..?
Rahul- I think I breathe slowly…
Nakul- Correct…Anger, grief, impatience and depression causes irregular breathing resulting in confusion, tension, low energy level etc.,
Rahul- When we are happy..?
Nakul-Love, compassion and kindness causes deep expansive comfortable breathing resulting in peaceful relaxing mental state with high energy level.
And the conversation goes on……
Shortly thereafter, another team/volunteer who is good at audio work, picks the script and converts it into audio. Similarly, an animation volunteer may design an animation to present the scenario. Thus, content generation by differently skilled people at different times makes Seva stackable, with one event building over the earlier one.
Scenario 13 : Student progress reports and comments
User : Class teacher
The new teacher has been assigned class XB for the new academic year. She logs on to the SSSVV site, clicks on the link bearing the name of her school and clicks on progress report of her class students. She is able to see the reports of al her students for the last three years with relevant comments from other teachers and former class teachers. She is now ready to meet her new children next week.
Feature needed :
Online secure data about students’ performance.
Rationale for this requirement: Make the site a one stop shop for all things related to the school administration. That will encourage the teachers to use the site regularly and gain confidence and a comfort level with the site. This will encourage them to generate more content online (which can be used by other teachers too)
Scenario 14 : Teacher pooling
User : Multiple teachers (including those from outside schools)
Level : Advanced
At later phases of the project, the Vidya Vahini platform will also become a task scheduler for non-traditional teaching environments. For example, children of construction workers at a big construction site, can be arranged to get basic education at a shed constructed at the site. Volunteers and teachers from nearby areas can plan out a lesson plan that caters to handling of successive chapters every week in a scheduled manner. The volunteer scheduling and lesson planning can be done over the Vidya Vahini platform.