1. DIGITAL EDUCATION
Anant Murarka Guide: Mrs. S.Geetha, Assoc Prof., Dept of ISE
murarkaanant@gmail.com geetha.s@cmrit.ac.in
CMRIT , VTU. CMRIT, VTU
Abstract: - Digital education is facilitated by
technology. It occurs across all learning areas
and domains. Digital education facilitates DLE
and VLE. Important tools which make up a
Digital Education product are e-mail and
chat, online forums, video conferencing and
LMS. Digital Education encourages self
learning. Digital education is gaining wide
prominence and attention as the advanced
ICT( Information and Communications
technology is scaling up rapidly. Many
platforms of diverse kind exist like online &
offline learning portals, graphical simulators,
e-texts, applications, animation videos,
interactive games, etc. Digital Education on
the virtual world has changed the way of
learning and teaching. The challenge is to find
out different ways and optimal solutions
through which the digital resources can be
spread to all the sections of the society in
order to achieve the dream of 100% literacy
which is not somehow being possible with
traditional methods. I aim at bringing
forward the various insights of Digital
Education along with the tools which facilitate
its development.
Keywords: DLE, VLE, LMS, Information and
Communications Technology, Platforms.
I. INTRODUCTION
Digital education is an education system which was
developed to overcome the limitations and
constraints of traditional education system. As ICT
boomed the stake holders of Digital Education
System did not miss out on a single instance to
use the advanced ICT. Digitisation grasped the
attention of education system as well like all
other sectors. It all started with universities and
institutes developing digital tools to advance the
education system in order to provide a new
learning experience in the organisations. Later
when ICT reached to new horizons, people started
making extensive use of it and it spread to different
domains and education was one of them.
Universities started implementing Distance
education programs using Digital Education as aid
for those people
who did not have access to traditional education.
This marked the advent of authenticated
enrolments to digitised education. Universities also
used technology to evaluate and monitor the
performance and progress of the students.
Subsequently lot of organisations and start-ups
came up with the idea of open-source
education . Here the candidate did not have to
officially enrol him/herself to any institute or
university. All that was required was their existence
in the virtual world through registered
user/email account and any content available on
that platform was accessible to them. Later
outcomes of Digital Education started getting
recognised when a mechanism to verify the
identity of the learners was developed. This was
to the credit of one or two domains of Digital
Education. Vendors and individuals started
developing graphical simulators, online
interactive games, videos that use animation,
recorded contents in audio format, etc. Today
there is a need to integrate the goods of all the
different types of products of digital education to
create a full fledged learning environment which
is efficient, robust, stable, scalable, reachable to
masses & makes optimized use of resources.
II .RELATED WORK
A lot engineering marvels exists in the form of web
based platforms, vendor specific frame-works, e-
text books, graphical simulators, discussion forums,
informative videos using animation, mobile
applications, Massive open online courses. Few
existing systems along with the technology and
infrastructure they make use of :
 MOOC – coursera.org, edx.org,
udacity.com, alison.com.
Objective specific platforms –
examtime.com, exceedin.com
They host their portals on cloud running
on web servers facilitated by
DBMS and multimedia processing.
 Vendor specific frameworks – tabGATE,
Oxford Advance

2. learners dictionary, Take-off series by
OUP.
They record their content within a
framework on a storage medium
such as DVD or host on web and
deploy in market for profit making.
 Graphical Simulators – Turing Machine
simulator, Cisco Packet
Tracer, Netsim, Data structures simu-
-lator. They make use of programming
languages like Java, Python, etc and
are developed using IDEs like Eclipse,
dreamviewer,etc.
 E-books – Google books, amazon kindle.
They have used H2S mechanisms to
develop e-books.
 Mobile applications - Stand alone apps
along with mobile version on android and
ios phones for the above
mentioned products.
III. FRAMEWORK FOR A COMPLETE
DIGITAL EDUCATION PLATFORM
 Infrastructure:
Mainly relates with IT infrastructure required to
develop the platform. Includes web hosting
services such as cloud. Cloud can be used for (
*aaS ) depending on the requirement. Web
servers like ngnix, apache, glassfish, tomcat, etc.
DBMS like MongoDB , PostgreSQL,
MySQL,etc. Runtime environments and IDEs –
Depending on the technology used their usage
varies. Commonly used IDEs are Eclipse, Kiel, etc.
 Databases :
The following stake holders DB should be
maintained at the backend.
 Learner’s DB : The students
information is stored.
 Instructor’s DB: The available
Instructor’s information those
who have already registered.
 Content: The revised content as
required for specific programs
is maintained in separate DB. A
graph database is more suitable
because co-location of storage is
not guaranteed.
 Admin db : People who maintain
the databases, report progress,
look for upgradation, etc (non-
functional roles in this context).
 Regulatory Authority db : The
proposed platform is universal
comprising of various trades,
hence reg. auth. for each program
will be different and this db
contain their information.
 Third Party Vendors db: This db
contains information about the
vendors who supply various
components to the platform like
software distributions, hardware,
host machines, etc.
 Service provider’s db : Entities
which provide services like
domain name services, cloud
hosting, hardware and software
maintenance ,etc are the ones
who occupy this db.
 Pillars of the platform : The various tools
and applications which form the pillars
are:
 MMLS : Stands for multimedia
learning System. An intelligent
management system,
which serves as a platform for
the delivery of multimedia rich
contents to its learners.
 Discussion forums: A virtual
place where multiple people at a
time can carry out
discussion. The discussions are
carried out by posting comments
and they are
available for future reference.
 Video conferencing, chat, email :
Evergreen tools whose
mechanisms are already
developed and their uses are
apparent.
 Digital library : A platform in its
own right. An environment where
all the course relevant material is
accessible in digital format. The
formats used may be pdf,.doc,
.xls, .txt, .mp3, .mp4, etc.
 Paperless environment : The
whole concept of digital
education aims
at achieving a paperless
environment.
 E-books : Main component of
Digital library. Organised
material of information , soft
copy of existing real world text
books.

3.  IVR : Stands for Interactive
Voice Response. It is a
technology that allows a
computer to interact with humans
through the use of voice and
DTMF tones input via keypad.
 Digital Signature : An application
used to denote one’s uniqueness
in the virtual world. To be used
here as a part of verification of
documents.
 Radio multimedia : How
multimedia Information can be
transferred using existing
mediums( radio waves) and
improvements on it.
 Simulations : Simulators are tools
which create a virtual setup
similar to that of
real world. They help in giving
hands on experience with
theoretical concepts and with
critical systems for which real
time practice may prove to be an
expensive affair.
 Interactive games : Traditional
ways of learning may
sometimes prove monotonous,
to provide a new learning
experience interactive games are
an option. They also help in
evaluating performance and
progress of learners.
 Document Management System :
It is used to track, manage and
store documents.
 Automated monitoring,
authentication & Content review
: Monitoring is done based on set
bench marks and current
performance. Authentication
system includes verifying the
identity of the learner and his
work in the virtual world.
Content review is revision of
contents every now and then to
meet the changing needs based
on certain parameters.
 E-procurement : Its a method to
acquire tenders and colaborate
with universities, vendors and
service providers.
 Routing, Searching and Hashing
algorithms: Deals at
implementation level. Efficient
algorithms are employed to
achieve the goal.
 Medium, Architecture and Hardware:
Includes the class of devices, Type of
architecture, Use of internet as medium of
communication. The architecture
employed here is 3-tier client/server
architecture.
 Stake Holders:
The stake holders involved can be
classified as Learner, Instructor, Admin,
Regulatory Authority, Service provider,
Third party vendors, etc.
IV. Pros and Cons of Digital Education
 Pros
 Learning at individual capacity and on
demand with flexible usage.
 The multimedia rich property is easy to
understand and engage.
 The location constraint is barred off.
 The digital education platforms are
consistent with centralised control, quality
of content and education for all motive.
 Creates virtual learning and knowledge
sharing.
 It becomes cost effective with reduced
redundancy, material cost,
travel/accommodation.
 Precise monitoring of progress.
 A particular section of society who have
limitations and constraints reaching
traditional educational institutions can
make use of these educational aids to
attain literacy.
 Cons
 Personality and Behavioural skills
development are restricted.
 Ethics and mannerism cannot be induced
effectively into learners.
 Identity establishment methods are
limited.
 Authentication of submitted work is an
issue and may lead to plagiarism.
 Prone to unethical activities like hacking,
manipulating of confidential information

4. if the security and authentication
mechanism are loosely coupled with the
underlying layers of the digital education
framework.
CONCLUSION
When a stable and robust framework such
as the one discussed above is developed, it
should be deployed in such a way that it
offers “FREEMIUM” services to the
benefit of all stake-holders. The
framework ought to be deployed in
various modules for different domains of
learning thereby maintaining the quality
and consistency of education. Few
interfacing mechanisms such as identity
establishment techniques, authenticity,
document management need further
optimisation. With advancement in
SCAMA (Social Media, Cloud, Analytics,
Mobility and Artificial Intelligence)
applications such as IVR, Interactive
games such as
input through gestures, Graphical
Simulators, etc will reach new horizons
and prove significant in deploying Digital
Education Platforms.
References
[1] Kim Flintoff, “Connections between Drama
Education and the Digital Education
Revolution”,
Curtin university, Centre for e-Learning.
[2] Anand A Jha “Importance of ICT for
Modern Library & Information
Services”, ACCMAN Institute of
Management,
Greater Noida, 2010
[3] Renee Hobs “Media Literacy, Technology
Integration and
Education Reform” , Sabanici University,
Istanbul,
Turkey, October 8, 2012.
[4] Renee Hobs “Digital Authorship and
Making as Learning”,
Summer Institute on Digital Literacy. July 16,
2013.
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