Proposal submitted to MHRD for the - National Mission on ICT in Education

under the thrust areas -

Development and realization of Virtual Reality LaboratoriesDevelopment and realization of Virtual Reality and supporting facilities for e-learning

AND

Adaptation & deployment of open source simulation packages equivalent to MATLAB, ORCAD etc.,

Project OSCAR++

Open Source Course-ware Animations Repository for higher education:

A model for setting OSS labs in Institutes of Undergraduate Education

Principal Investigators: C. Vijaya Lakshmi, Prof. Sridhar Iyer

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Indian Institute of Technology Bombay

2009

Project OSCAR++

(Open Source Course-ware Animations Repository for higher education:

A model for setting OSS labs in Institutes of Undergraduate Education)

Principal Investigators: C. Vijaya Lakshmi, Prof. Sridhar Iyer

1. Goals:

The main goals of the project are:

  1. Creation of e-learning material (animations) for higher education in various disciplines (Engineering & Sciences) at both UG and PG levels.
  2. Evolving a model for setting Open Source software labs in institutes of Higher Education.

Two auxiliary goals are:

  1. Provide training opportunities to large number of B.E./M.C.A. project students.
  2. Translation of the content into local languages.

2, Deliverables Overview:

The deliverables of the project (over a period of 3 years) are:

  1. A large number (about 300 to 400) of animations (Open Source) which can be distributed to UG and PG level institutes and colleges. Assuming 10-15 animations per course, and assuming that 30-40 courses are taken up, this could result in about 300 to 400 animations during the three year duration of the project.
  2. Video clips of expert lectures on some of the above topics.
  3. Translation of the above material into vernacular - a few (4-6) local languages.
  4. Pilot studies on effectiveness of the materials created, in collaboration with a few colleges.
  5. Dissemination of the repository content on-line: through Project OSCAR web portal and off-line: through the CDs published from time to time where internet connectivity is not easily available.
  6. Training a large number (300-400) of B.E./M.C.A. project students in software engineering through their participation in the creation of these animations, as part of their final year projects.
  7. Providing employment opportunities to the trained students.
  8. A model for setting up an OSS lab to replicate and extend this work to more disciplines.

3. Funding Sought:

The total budgeted estimate for the project is Rs. 3 crores, 90 lakhs. (Details are provided in Section 12)

4. Implementation Methodology

Development of animations: Development of an animation involves the following phases with the contribution from domain experts, mentors, developers, testers, evaluators and a web team.

  1. Identification and specification of the concept by a domain expert, the mentor.
  2. Elaborating the concept and developing the outline of the story board for demos, interactions, test questions etc., that enable the learner to understand and explore the concept further - This is the main phase of the project and both the developer and the mentor interact over the web to create the story board for the animation.
  3. Development of the animation by a developer.
  4. Testing of the execution (with test cases) of the animation by a tester.
  5. Evaluation of the animation by the domain expert.
  6. Final phase – uploading the animation to the repository – maintenance of repository contents and the website by the web development team.

OSS practices lab: The developers are put through the OSS practices when they join the project and are trained to adapt and explore the OSS tools and technologies. While inducting the students into OSS practices and training, a model lab has been evolving at IIT Bombay. We are in the process of fine tuning these practices and improving on the existing practices to recommend a model for setting up OSS labs in institutes of Higher education that would not only benefit the existing students but provide employment opportunities to the graduating students.

5. Benefits and the Target Beneficiaries:

Animations:

Students in 4000 and odd engineering colleges: Assuming the content is distributed to 1000 colleges and each college has 100 students, the total number of students who would benefit will be 1 lakh per year and 3 lakhs in three years and many more lakhs of students in the years to come.

Students in the distant education mode: The number of students opting for distance education is continuously increasing. It is estimated that at least 10 thousand such students would benefit annually.

Students in Sciences stream: Assuming that the content is distributed to 1000 colleges and each college has 200 students, the total number of students who would benefit will be 2 lakhs per year and 6 lakhs in three years and many more lakhs of students in the years to come.

Remote areas where internet connectivity is not easily and continuously available: Offline distribution of repository contents which are released from time to time on CDs will benefit the students in colleges and institutes where internet connectivity is not easily and continuously available..

OSS lab: Assuming at least 100 colleges implement the model in their colleges and 100 students per year use the resources in the lab to acquire developmental experience, the total number of students who would benefit will be ten thousand per year. Thus we have a huge work force conversant with the OSS technologies and tools. The additional benefits would be the open source technologies usage for services like web, email, networking etc., and in the in-house applications as the expertise in OSS will be available locally. Finally the recurring costs of proprietary software can be avoided.

The benefits of such a lab are:

An opportunity to experiment and innovate.

Tinkering with the OS and its kernel brings confidence in not only maintaining the systems but becoming expert system developers and administrators.

First hand experience in handling major projects from scratch gives a sound foundation in practical application of text book knowledge and in software engineering.

Analysing tools, benchmarking and providing technical reports gives experience in technical communication skills.

Working in the lab and with open source, collaborative development, team work exposure helps in achieving the personal aspirations and goals.

Development practices such as issue tracking, version control, unit testing, style guidelines, the daily build, code reviews by peers, release engineering and traceability in an open environment help in understanding importance of such practices.

Freedom to view the code of the projects and the internals of the technologies used from the day one of entering the lab, is not only a motivating factor but brings in the determination to contribute to the open source.

The students who gain experience in these labs can bridge the gap of shortage of OSS experienced work force.

The feedback from the preliminary experiment at IIT Bombay, indicated that availability of a OSS lab similar to the one at IIT Bombay would be a boon for students of colleges. Manpower available for contribution to open source would increase over the years.

6. Project Details:

Project OSCAR intends to focus on the development of animations and simulations for higher education. In the process we also intend to develop a model for setting up an OSS lab which is not only cost effective but can provide the students exposure to the open source OS and technologies, provide employment opportunities to the graduating students.

Creation of e-learning material / animations for Engineering & Sciences.

6a. Need

Education methodologies are evolving to stimulate student interests. Technology is being extensively explored and used for improving understanding of concepts by students. Internet has become one medium of instruction in distance and independent learning.

However, there is still a lack of availability of appropriate course material. Also, even when the material is available, it is often high priced and of uncertain quality. Hence there is a need for (i) Good quality courseware, including an interactive environment for students to access educational material and assimilate it at their own pace, and (ii) low cost and large scale dissemination of the courseware.

6b. Solution Strategy

For creation of good quality courseware, e-learning contents could be created, with emphasis on interactive animations and videos, corresponding to individual topics or concepts in the curriculum. For example, animations could be created for “how steel is made”, or for demonstrating the “effect of changing the length of a link in a four bar linkage mechanism”, or for a complex chemical process that cannot be conducted as an experiment in the chemistry lab. A 3-5 minute animation on such topics (which are currently part of the curriculum) would be useful for teachers, students and in instances where there teachers are not accessible.

For low cost and large scale dissemination, Open Sourcing is perhaps the best way to ensure that the courseware reaches a large number of users at a minimal cost. Development of appropriate courseware and free availability of the same would benefit a large number of learners. Teachers in turn can download the courseware and customize and adapt it according to their need. In areas where there is poor connectivity, offline cds of the repository content is made available for both teachers and learners.

7a. Pilot undertaken at IIT Bombay

Keeping in view the above perspective a pilot project was undertaken at IIT Bombay and was entitled Project OSCAR (Open Source Courseware Animations Repository). The aim was to create a repository, of educational courseware with animations for independent and distance learning, whose contents are open sourced. At present, about 100 animations available across various disciplines have been created. Details of the project are available at the website and are provided in Appendix I at the end of this proposal.

7b. Papers/ Awards

  • Project OSCAR has received the “Best open source initiative award” in the category of digital learning at the eIndia-08 conference.
  • A paper on pilot implementation of Project OSCAR was presented at the eIndia 2008 conference ( held at Pragati Maidan, Delhi.
  • A paper about developer training by C. Vijaya Lakshmi and Sridhar Iyer. entitled “Leveraging student projects for the development of open source software” was presented at the conference in the Symposium on Information Technology in Education (SITE) , Atlanta, USA, March 2004

Figure 1: The GUI for searching the repository in Project OSCAR

8a.Portal structure (Project Oscar)

The Project OSCAR portal interface provides the user with following functionalities:

Searching the repository for

Available courseware with animations and downloading the same,

Concepts suggested by experts for development into courseware with animations

Registration of Developers and Mentors

Communication channels like email, discussion forum, bulletin board, for interaction between registered members of Project OSCAR

Management of the repository

8b. Proposed enhancements and extensions:

The proposed project would further extend the ongoing pilot project in a systematic manner to a much larger scale.

9. Expected Outcomes

The project will develop a large open source repository of web based, interactive animations for teaching, independent and distance learning. The target is about 300 additional animations, relating to the engineering and science courses at UG and PG level.

Conduct workshops and events for students and teachers to familiarize them with the contents developed.

10. Proposed Implementation Methodology

The individual steps of the project can be broadly enumerated as follows:

  1. Identification of mentors who are the subject experts in the different subjects.
  2. Identification of concepts for which animations are to be developed. Categorizing them into basic and advanced.
  3. Identification of additional open source simulation packages and technologies to be adapted for the development of animations.
  4. Development of animations for the subjects in the basic level. Each animation requires 2 programmers, working for 3-4 weeks.
  5. Development of animations for subjects in the advanced level. Each animation requires 2 programmers, working for 6-8 weeks.
  6. Suggesting some experiments to be performed using the animations, if relevant. (suggest some predefined values of parameters and ask the user to observe the results).
  7. Development of related text explanations and documentation.
  8. Getting some user feedback for the developed animations and fine-tuning.
  9. Thorough testing and quality control of the animations developed.
  10. Sequencing of the developed animations into a logical courseware.
  11. Translation into local languages.
  12. Events for dissemination of contents developed and teacher training workshops.
  13. Identification of colleges for conducting pilot studies.
  14. Development of a model that can be replicated for extending the development to more disciplines.

11. Duration

The overall estimated project duration is three years. This will be carried out in a phased manner. The year-wise time milestones and schedule is as follows:

Year 1 / Approximately 10 animations per discipline covering 10 disciplines – a total of 100 animations.
Testing of the animations
Translation of animations into other languages.
Creating awareness and training workshops – 2 per year
Enhancing the Project OSCAR website to handle the scaling up of numbers.
Fine tuning the management and quality control systems.
Survey and improvise the practices in the lab to evolve a model of the lab.
Year 2 / Approximately 10 animations per discipline covering 10 disciplines – a total of 100 animations.
Testing of the animations
Translation of animations into other languages.
Creating awareness and training workshops – 2 per year
Pilot study of usefulness of animations developed, in selected colleges.
Preparation of tutorials of OSS simulation packages and tools, used for the development of the animations.
Year 3 / Approximately 10 animations per discipline covering 10 disciplines – a total of 100 animations.
Testing of the animations
Translation of animations into other languages.
Creating awareness and training workshops – 2 per year
Recommendation of a model OSS lab which will contain
Lab setup document
Lab practices document
Documentation of recommended hardware configurations,
List of Open Source OS,
List of Tools and Technologies and their Usage
Tutorials for adaptation and deployment
CD kit with the OS, Open Source tools and application software
Animation development and deployment tutorial

12. Budget

Item / Year 1 / Year 2 / Year 3 / Total
Equipment (PCs, servers, CD duplicators, laptops, accessories) / 15,00,000 / 5,00,000 / 5,00,000 / 25,00,000
Manpower
(Note: 10% increment per year )
Project Managers (2) at 35,000 p.m and accounts manager (1): at Rs. 20,000 per month / 10,80,000 / 11,88,000 / 13,06,800 / 35,74,800
Developers(15), Designers (2) and testers (3): at 17,000 per month / 40,80,000 / 44,88,000 / 49,36,80 / 1,35,04,800
Mentors/subject experts honorarium (100 animations) : at Rs.5,000 per animation / 5,00,000 / 5,50,000 / 6,05,000 / 16,55,000
Translators honorarium
(8 languages, 100 animations):at Rs. 1250 per animation, per language / 10,00,000 / 11,00,000 / 12,10,000 / 33,10,000
Technical team for OSS lab model (3): at
20, 000 p.m. / 6,48,000 / 7,12,800 / 7,84,080 / 21,44,880
Project assistants and others (3):
Rs. 9,000 per month / 3,60,000 / 3,96,000 / 4,35,600 / 11,91,600
Manpower sub-total / 76,68,000 / 84,34,800 / 92,78,280 / 2,53,81,080
Workshops and Training (2):
Rs. 1,50,000 per workshop / 3,00,000 / 3,00,000 / 3,00,000 / 9,00,000
Travel / 2,00,000 / 3,00,000 / 3,00,000 / 8,00,000
Consumables / 2,00,000 / 2,00,000 / 2,00,000 / 6,00,000
Contingencies / 6,00,000 / 6,00,000 / 6,00,000 / 18,00,000
Total / 1,04,68,000 / 1,03,34,800 / 1,11,78,280 / 3,19,81,080
Institute overhead,
20% of Total / 20,93,600 / 20,66,960 / 22,35,656 / 63,96,216
Co-ordinator's
honorarium, 2%*Total / 2,09,360 / 2,06,696 / 2,23,565 / 6,39,621
Grand Total / 1,27,70,960 / 1,26,08,456 / 1,36,37,501 / 3,90,16,918

The total budgeted estimate for the project is Rs. 3 crores, 90 lakhs.

APPENDIX – I

Details of Project OSCAR – Pilot

1. Introduction

With the internet becoming a medium of instruction for distance education and independent learning, technology is being extensively explored as a means of supporting various education methodologies. However, there is still a lack of appropriate course material. The typical courseware available is monolithic set of web-based or video lectures. Most of the times, it is difficult for teachers to adapt them into their own courses, since they may be interested in only some sub-part of the entire content. It is difficult to extract the sub-parts from monolithic course material. The material available, is often highly priced and of uncertain quality. In the educational scenario, there is a lack ofmotivation, the students are seldom attracted to the mundane study materials provided to them. Such materials are developed in a routine manner, without keeping in view the individual needs of the students. Hence, there is a need for (i) good quality, cost effective courseware, including an interactive environment for students to access educational material and assimilate it at their own pace, and (ii) large scale dissemination of this courseware.

Free and open source software (FOSS) can help in integrating remoteusers across the globe by making the material easily available, often at zero cost, to those who need it. FOSS not only reduces dependence on proprietary material but also enables people from across the world to contribute to the development. There are many such FOSS efforts across the world. Some efforts from India are: OSSRC ( FSF

( and CC (

Project OSCAR stands for Open Source Courseware Animations Repository. Keeping in view the above perspective the Project OSCAR a pilot for developing the content was initiated at IIT Bombay with an aim to create a large repository of animations and simulations for primary, secondary and undergraduate level with multiple local languages support for teaching various concepts and technologies, ranging from high school to advanced topics.

2, Open Source technologies used in the project

In our pilot project (Project OSCAR), we are using Java as the programming language, Linux (ubuntu) as the operating system and Wiki (dokuWiki) for internal project co-ordination. The website uses PostgreSQL as backend.

The applets developed in Project OSCAR, are available free-of-cost, including the source code, from our website So far we have 133 animations, 7006 downloads and more than 12,390 visitors to our site, in the past 2 years.

Project OSCAR web portal

  1. Project Details and Milestones

The main goal of Project OSCAR (Open Source Courseware Animations Repository) is to create a large repository of web-based, interactive animations for teaching various concepts and technologies. An auxiliary goal of Project OSCAR is to provide training opportunities to a large number of students. The training would typically involve the creation of an animation for a particular concept. It may also include management and maintenance of the animations in the repository.