Would ACC break the Global boundaries of e-Learning and Assessment?
Imagine the grades of a kid from a rural area of a developing country getting compared to those of kids from developed countries in real time and the e-Learning courseware getting adjusted to the requirement automatically. Surprised? So am I.
We’ve all seen and heard a lot about e-Learning and the benefits of it being available anywhere in the world. Mostly it’s language specific or needs to be converted manually……
Looking at the speed at which the world is developing technologically, do we see e-Learning and Assessment breaking the language barrier in near future? Google and some other software already have the capability of translating in real time from one language to another with sufficient accuracy.
Would it be a matter of time before we see Automatic Content Conversion (ACC) wherein online Tests/Courses authored in one language, get automatically converted and available in any local language of any country on a click of a mouse? The e-Learning and Assessment could also be used to grade the skill level of kids of Regions, Countries, Continents without any language barriers.
The benefit that we should be able to see is that it would not only enable same content delivery across the globe on any kind of device without manually redoing the content, but would also help compare peer groups across continents who do not even know of each others language. This would mean creation of a Virtual World School in true sense, wouldn’t it….?
Reasonable to say “Virtual World School “, It won’t be only content sharing, knowledge transfer through e-learning rather it will be equipping persons to grasp the contents in the tongue they are very quicker to.
If the Automatic Content Conversion (ACC) can be equipped with “Text to Audio” , It might be helpful to another disabled ones.
Undoubtly yes and I see it as the future of the eLearning and Assessment.
Well Said !
Our country still sees a lot of students having to change their medium/language of study from a regional language to english once they grow from class 10 to 10+2. That ensures that we loose a lot of talent specially when we judge merit in terms of marks or grade secured. It does not take into account how difficult it is for a student to suddenly adapt and understand every term in english (be it from science, social studies or mathematics) when he or she has been studying them in another language for the past 10 years. No wonder I have seen such students using scientific dictonaries for help.
I do agree that ACC may be the next gen technology in global e-learning platform. Just to add few pointers before we may actually extract real benefit of ACC -
1. The content conversion or ‘translation’ as in google translate should be semantically intelligent and not just word to word conversion/translation to keep the context meaningful.
2. The design of application (especially UI point of view) to adjust the length and breadth of the converted content in new language.
3. Natural language generation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_generation) might be a problem area we may want to solve before we move to ACC completely.
4. Once the above problems/opportunities are absorbed we can definitely go for ‘Text to Voice’ conversion along with ACC. US already has a law ADA (American Disability Act) to give disable students an equal opportunity to read/study. It is not far that all our application might have to be ADA compliant. So ADA is an opportunity for us.
If you are not ahead of technology, your competition will eat you. Someone rightly said “Eat breakfast or Breakfast will eat you.” We should be prepared for technology changes before anyone else does.
Thank you Ravi for throwing some lights on future technology.
~Ajoy Kumar Singha
http://www.ajoysingha.info
http://www.testingcircus.com
Interesting thoughts on future of e-learning. We might have virtual classrooms where in the professor is sitting in one part of the world and taking class all around the world. The speech gets converted to text and other languages.
The students can ask there questions on the chat in native languages that are converted to the language of professor. The professors respond in there language and it gets converted to the language of students.
The question is how fast can we have credible language converters available. Let us wait and watch
Hope that some artificial intelligent software can come into existence which can translate articles, questions, education content apart from rule based grammar.
The intelligent translation technology should be able interpreted to sign language like Braille or spoken with accent of different dialects or written to different oral languages in different media (computer / mobile).
Dream can become reality one day.
Please educate the readers on benefits of comparing grades of a kid from a rural area of a developing country getting compared to those of kids from developed countries.
@reachmukul A very good Question indeed. The world as we all know is turning into a Global Village and the rate at which this is happening is far exceeding what we’d ever thought of. A couple of years back who could’ve imagined that the remotest corner of developing nations could be just a call away.
To answer your question, the Gap between nations is narrowing a so is the need for standardizations across various fields. Education is just one of them. UNESCO has been working to get a complete picture of Global Education system and through comparisons would like to improve or suggest ways and methods for the improvement of the education imparted to the areas where this is lagging (Like Developing nations and specially the remote areas).
What better and cheaper way than the use of e-Learning and ACC to achieve this goal.
@Rajeev Chugh This is a very thoughtful input. Thanks for taking this further Rajeev.
@Ajoy Kumar Singha Very insightful Ajoy. Your thoughts have really added value to the blog. Things do take time to evolve, but the way technology is evolving this does not seem too far in the future.
@Manish Kumar As you’ve rightly pointed out, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are a number of things that can be done through further enhancement of this area.
@Upaindur Quite doable Upaindur. Text to native speech is already making way into devices. A two way conversion would not be a difficult thing to do. I suppose this should be just round the corner if not already available. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.