Browsing by Author "Saxena, Anurag"

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    Open Access
    A Model for Evaluating Numerical through Computer
    (2006-10) Saxena, Anurag
    PCF4 // In recent times the education world has seen the emergence of two efforts at using computers to evaluate the content of essays. The reason behind the emergence of these systems was the difficulty in managing the load of grading the essays and the tendency of the evaluators to shift the focus of assessment to multiple-choice questions. These systems generated a lot of enthusiasm as they not only save time but also provide consistency a computer can deliver. // Present communication tries to emphasize on the age-old concept of "marking schemes". It tries to build its arguments around two theories of learning. Firstly, structural learning theory which postulates that structural analysis is a methodology for identifying the rules to be learned for a given topic and breaking them down into their atomic components and secondly, script theory, which focused on the structure of knowledge and conceptual dependency theory. The key element of conceptual dependency theory is the idea that all the conceptualizations can be represented in terms of a small number of primitive acts performed. // Present paper attempts at building a system that will use the accuracy and consistency of a computer to achieve robust and unbiased student assessment. // Paper ID 273
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    Open Access
    A grape that sees another gets ripe: Some OER issues for the Commonwealth
    (2013-11) Saxena, Anurag
    Human development Index gives a high importance to the gross enrollment ratio. Therefore the future of countries is more and more dependent on the knowledge, skills, and resourcefulness of its human resources. However, most of the countries continue to feel beleaguered due to their failure to address the issues of access, quality and equity in higher education. Inequalities exist both between and within countries. Open Educational Resources (OER) have given a ray of hope for countries to do away with these issues and inequalities. However there are problems aplenty. Current research highlights the barriers for OER adoption as contextual and language gaps, cultural diversity, differences in educational privilege & literacy and need for basic education. The very definition of “Commonwealth” says that it is an intergovernmental organisation in which countries with diverse social, political and economic backgrounds are regarded as equal in status. To achieve this one has to look for inequalities and how these can be overcome. The paper thus proposes to analyze the commonwealth countries on the basis of data, collected by COL from governmental, intergovernmental, and international organisation sources for each country. It will use parameters like Rural Population percent, Adult Literacy Rates, Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER), Primary Dropouts, Total Public Expenditure on Education as a % of GNP and access to computer & internet. The paper intends to do an exploratory analysis to discover methods that can work as solutions for issues and inequalities faced by countries for effective use of OER. Eventually it is cooperation within the Commonwealth that will see each country prosper and achieve it educational goals. Hence it rightly said, “A grape that sees another gets ripe.” // Paper ID: 293
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    Open Access
    Pedagogical Designs for Generation of Contents for the Community
    (2010-11) Saxena, Anurag
    When one talks about growth of technology applications in education, one normally asks a question: we are moving towards what? Probably the appropriate answer is, towards a convergence point of technologies & what is that? The answer is, towards a Virtual Reality i.e. a "virtual classroom" & what is a virtual classroom? The answer is, where the distance between the teacher and the taught is nil. And finally, how one can make the distance nil? The answer is by generating good e-contents and by making them available to all those who wish to learn. E-contents are basically a package that satisfies the conditions like i.e. minimization of the distance, cost effectiveness, user-friendliness and adaptability to local conditions. As per www.answers.com, we can define e-content as follows // E-content: digital content that can be transmitted over a computer network such as the Internet. // Digital content: Products available in digital form. It typically refers to music, information and images that are available for download or distribution on electronic media. // According to Webster dictionary, "pedagogy" refers to the whole context of instruction, learning, and the actual operations involved therein. So our task in this section would be to define how to develop strategies so that the e-content that we offer our students come good with respect to the context of instruction as well as learning. It would also entail the operations i.e. the accessibility, acceptability and user-friendliness of these contents. In this section, we discuss various pedagogies involved in generation of e-content. We have further talked about various types of educational contents that are suitable for treatment as e-content.
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    Open Access
    Readability of Open Education Resources (OERs): A key to success of ODL for the young people
    (2008) Saxena, Anurag
    According to Baumel (2002), “20 percent of school age kids are poor readers and remain that way through their lifetime”. It has been proved repeatedly that reading is a language-based skill. Poor reading skills thus results in attainment of poor educational levels. It implies that even if a learner is interested in reading a book, he finds it difficult to read it independently. The technology catches the attention of young people and children. The young ones show a positive trend in learning from newer forms of instruction and instructional resources. A few open resources that have proved their worth in recent times are Project Gutenberg (oldest producer of free e-books on the Internet http://www.gutenberg.org/ ), public domain electronic texts ((http://www.infomotions.com/etexts/ ) and open education resources (OERs) of WikiEducator (http://www.wikieducator.org/Main_Page). It is quite possible to provide standardized learning materials to the young learners with the help of above-mentioned resources. Now the question arises about the readability of these resources. If these resources have a poor readability then they will not be so useful for learners with not so good reading skills and thus resulting in poor education levels. Flesch Readability Index is deemed as a standard as far as the readability of the documents is concerned. It is also said that writers use Zipf’s principle of least effort to simplify communication and that Zipf’s law is applicable in understanding human language. Zipf’s law explains the equilibrium between uniformity and diversity in usage of words. In this communication, we have taken some sets of texts from aforesaid sources and tried to analyze them to investigate the readability of the document and the Zipf’s coefficients. The paper also discusses the implications of these results for ODL for the young people. // Paper ID 144