Pune: With the aim of developing technology as a positive enabler in ‘smart’ classrooms, the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, (IIT-B) has teamed up with Pune-based Mojo Networks to create a mobile app to conduct exams in a highly efficient way.
The app, called SAFE, renders superfluous the overheads of printing question and answer papers, distributing and collecting them, and manually correcting them. It is an outcome of over two years of research by professors and student researchers at the IIT-B, and has undergone multiple rounds of refinement based on feedback from pilot deployment and use in classrooms.
A SAFE option
Coupled with Mojo’s Wi-Fi services, SAFE is already in use for different purposes in smart classrooms. “It is easy to operate and most importantly, SAFE is safe; it employs a host of mechanisms to ensure the integrity of the exam by restricting the use of the smart device for the intended purpose, that is, for the duration of the exam only,” said Dr. Bhaskaran Raman of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT-B.
The app enables the instructor to instantly view the consolidated mark list as soon as the student submits the quiz. This enables students to get real-time feedback from the professor, helping them focus better on learning, especially in large classes.
Dr. Raman said that so far, SAFE has been used for in-class quizzes in 14 IIT-B courses over two years. The app was also used in the pre-interview screening test for the institute’s research assistantship admissions to the M.Tech. programme in Computer Science and Engineering in May last year.
Paper-free, cheating-free
“With SAFE, conducting objective exams is paper-free and cheating-free. It eliminates the tedious process of manual evaluation and eases the conduct of surveys or polls, with configurable anonymity for those answering the questions,” Dr. Raman said.
The efficacy of a smart classroom is dependent on a reliable and high performance Wi-Fi solution, says Pravin Bhagwat, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Mojo Networks.
“We have designed our ‘Cognitive WiFi’ solution to meet precisely the same objectives on a mass scale, while minimising the total cost of deployment, operations and monitoring,” Mr. Bhagwat told The Hindu .
