Our quest for working on exciting and socially relevant projects led us to Bharti Vidyapeeth, BVU Amplify Dept of Infotech and Mgt , Pune.

The College is a part of the Bharti Vidyapeeth Group which runs over 170 colleges and institutes across India. Amplify Mindware Group of Institutions is the I.T. college within the Bharti Vidyapeeth Group.

I have been interacting with the Chairman and the CEO of the college for the past couple of months and have recently inked a contract to provide interactive virtual avatars to their students.

The College has a dedicated elearning division (http://www.enhanceducation.com/) which is responsible for all initiatives in the learning space. “The vision for EnhanceEducation is to create an additional parallel channel for learner / student to acquire curriculum based studies either for purposes of learning, revision or even last minute exam preparation”

I am glad that there are colleges in India who are  proactive in adopting new technology and methedologies to distribute content. This will bridge the vast divide between people who want to learn and their ability to access quality content.

The first release will be for internal use by the students – it is a web based virtual avatar which uses off the shelf text to speech engines along-with the interactive alabot rule engine. The idea is to make learning fun and get the students to use the content created by the college more frequently and effectively.

There are various research papers which detail the advantages of using embodied agents for elearning.

The case study attached below is by Stanford and I quote:-

“is a brief summary of the role that interactive online characters can play in automated teaching and commerce applications. The paper begins with a brief review of major conclusions from psychological research that has examined human responses to interactive technology. Subsequently, important benefits of interactive character interfaces are reviewed as they apply to online learning and business”

Stanford_University_avatar_case_study.pdf

I hope that this system can bring about an improvement in learning and spreading of education in India.