HP Labs India

Technology is playing an increasing role in education around the world. The vast community of educational institutions, teachers and students are leaders in sharing the resources they create. They are also leaders in the Web 2.0 effort.

The Technology in Education (TiE) effort will carry out research aimed at creating new ideas and techniques for use by this community and enhancing their effectiveness.

This effort involves a project of joint interest for HP Labs India and the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore.

Our area of research covers the following questions

• How can we identify the topics being discussed in a given item of text, viewgraph, etc., without fitting it into a rigid and hierarchical classification system?
   
• What techniques should we develop to enable creation of good metadata for resources that the academic world creates and shares with users on the Web?
   
• What should be the features of a user model in online learning systems to enable effective personalized education?
   
• How can online instruction systems and learning systems identify learning objects on the Web to meet the requirements at a given point in the learning process?
   
• How can we promote collaborative learning in student communities?
   
• How can we motivate and support students to work along the lines of Web 2.0 ideals, to create resources that will serve their own community?
   
• Can we advance the art of educationally relevant “serious games”? Can we create middleware which will map quizzes into such games automatically?
   
• Can all these techniques work in a distance learning context as well, drawing upon geographically distributed contributors and serving geographically distributed users?  

Research Threads:

• Use of semantic web techniques to enable personalized learning.
   
• Mapping quizzes into competitive games
   
• Promoting student collaboration, and harvesting of educational content from student-system interactions and student-student interactions
  

Platforms in Use

1. One of the platforms being used for this research is Moodle (see www.moodle.org ).
    
2. Another platform being used is HP Educenter, a video-content capture system which feeds a digital library, for providing on-demand, on-campus access to rich media content. HP Educenter was developed at HP Labs India.
   

Projects that we have done in the past are:

• Educenter

Brochure of the International Workshop on Techonology for Education

Publications:

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