V-Learning: Voice based Learning
The 'V- Learning' project is an innovative solution for people to access web based learning content through telephones. At present the web has grown to be one of the most popular medias for distant education and it is accessible via visual interfaces like web browsers. Unfortunately, the Internet access is still a dream for many people in the developing countries for several reasons. Thus, the main objective of the 'V- Learning' project is to give access to the Internet based learning content through basic voice communication. The concept can also be applied for many other applications in the developing countries.
The preliminary attempt of the project is to build an interactive voice learning environment for the students who access the Learning Management System (LMS) of University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC), Sri Lanka. The proposed system will be a voice site parallel to existing LMS web site and users are allowed to make a call to the voice site for education purposes. They could interactively access study materials, assessments etc. through the telephone. Since the voice call facilities are available in many rural areas and charges are relatively low, it would be beneficial for students in emerging economies. The research paper entitled 'V-Learning: Using Voice for Distant Learning in Emerging Regions' which describes the concept has been accepted for a 20 minutes oral presentation at the International Conference on Computer Supported Education in Lisbon, Portugal on March 23-26 2009.
This research has been initiated under the National E-Learning Center project of UCSC funded by Sida. At present we are looking for financial support to develop and deploy the concept in other possible application domains. We are also looking for some interesting parties in the other developing countries, who would like to deploy our v-learning system.
By Dr. Kasun De Zoysa, Senior Lecturer
University of Colombo School of Computing
