Entities

There are five possible entities in the system at present. These are administrator (for the learning management system), instructor (primary and secondary), student and content author. At the moment, each course can have one single primary instructor and any number of secondary instructors. Additional instructors can be added and deleted to course by the admin at any time. The removal of primary instructor, also leads to removal of course from the system. This structure resolves the IPR issues involved in any academic environment, where same course might be taught by different instructors in different semesters or academic years. In this system, each course is bound to its primary instructor, hence you can have two courses with same id and name, but with different primary instructors.

Functions (Instructor and student)

Content publishing: Instructor can upload/publish content material in any format, he desires, directly to the course. He can also upload the material to content repository and than publish it in one or more courses simultaneously. Instructor has option to run a SCORM packager and package the developed content as SCORM package which can then be deployed in Brihaspati or any other LMS. This has been achieved by integrating Relaod in Brihaspati 

Chat and Whiteboard: The users can communicate online. Of course, they have to be logged on at the same time for this. The instructor can make drawings using freehand as well as predefined graphic components along with the chatting. This makes live discussion over internet, more effective.

Student management: The instructor can manage students’ details in his own course, including addition, deletion and modifications.

Backup: The instructor can also take backup of the course material. In case of server crash, this can be restored with the help of administrator.

Remote course: Instructor can sell/buy course contents to/from another institute using Brihaspati-2 LMS.

Surveys: Admin can setup surveys to take feedback for the courses. It can be used to evaluate the instructors. The feedback can be seen by the instructor, which will help him improvement his instructions.

Question Bank: Under Question Bank Repository, instructor can create module wise question bank of various types (true/false, short type and multiple type).

Academic Evaluation: The instructor can conduct online test. Assignment can be submitted online and graded. The students can partitioned into group for various group activities for group base learning activities.

There are many other functionalities available to both students and instructors e.g., search engine, news, glossary, mail, discussion board, marks view (upload for instructor), task manager, calendar - personal and course specific, personal area for keeping material, facility of sharing the uploaded material in personal area, course specific Wiki for collaborative content authoring by the instructors and students.

Function (Administrator)

Admin creates new courses, registers Instructors and students. He can also backup/restore the course material, along with many other management tasks like List Management (view all courses and users), Communication, Event Management (conducting surveys in the courses). 

GUI language

Brihaspati has been modified architecturally to support multiple GUI languages. In the current distribution, we have English, Hindi, Urdu, Bangla and Marathi as the supported languages. German and Telugu are under development and are expected to be available in very soon.

What more in future?

1.SCORM (shareable content object reference model) based import/export, SCORM player implementation.

2. Extension to Multiserver architecture with business model for sharing the content among different Brihaspati installations.

3. Web service architecture to discover and use functionalities available over web.

4. Audio Chat, Multilingual  Authoring Tool and improved GUI based on AJAX

 

How to go about creating content?

Be object oriented. Each course  is collection of these independent standalone object (also called Learning objects); collection of these makes the learning material. Learning objects should be updated periodically to make them reusable objects.

Other Possibilities: The application can be modified and used in many new domains e.g., i) Human resource development in industry, ii) E-governance, and iii) CRM in industry.