The ICTACT is a non-profit organisation under the Department of Information Technology and Digital Services, Government of Tamil Nadu.
The ICT Academy of Tamil Nadu (ICTACT) has issued a tender for the development of a learning platform that will make use of artificial intelligence for producing learning content and assessment methodologies catering to Government Arts & Science colleges in the State. The ICTACT is a non-profit organisation under the Department of Information Technology and Digital Services, Government of Tamil Nadu.
The ICT Academy is looking to develop a common technology platform or portal to facilitate “project-based learning” for the college students. The bidder will have to set up a Learning Management System (LMS), dashboards, and “preinstalled common applications for developing apps, databases”.
The agency is expected to, “Develop a repository of problem statements and use cases for projects across various domains, leveraging advanced AI techniques and methodologies to ensure the collection is comprehensive, relevant, and dynamically updated to reflect current industry standards and challenges.” Additionally, the bidder must also provide “AI powered mentoring and guidance module” with an interactive interface for assisting students in project development, troubleshooting and testing, among other requirements.
Why does it matter?
Several Indian Ed-tech startups like BYJU’s and ConveGenius are already experimenting with AI-based tools for learning methodologies, data analysis, etc. Private institution Apeejay Education also recently announced its plans to use AI for teaching and learning operations. It’s important to note that these developments are taking place in the absence of any education-specific government guidelines for the use of AI. In India, there are concerns regarding biases in AI-generated content, and exclusion of certain groups of students due to greater dependency of administrators on algorithms for decision making. This calls for regulatory mandates for reviewing AI systems meant for educational use, and to tackle risks that can undermine human agency.
IT Ministry’s advisory for AI models:
The IT Ministry issued an advisory on March 1 mandating AI companies to obtain explicit permission from the government before launching any under-tested or unreliable AI models for Indian users. The AI models are required to be “appropriately labeled” to reflect that the output it generated is unreliable.
The advisory requires platforms to ensure that use of AI models on its service does not permit users to “host, display, upload, modify, publish, transmit, store, update or share” content outlined under Rule 3(1) (b) of India’s IT Rules, 2021. However, there are uncertainties regarding the application of the advisory to AI platforms and the IT Rules to AI models. Read more about the advisory here, and the questions that remain unanswered here.
Use of AI in India’s education sector
In December 2023, the IT Ministry had informed that the Education Ministry has initiated steps for the integration of Personalized Adaptive Learning (PAL), which is largely driven by technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), with the government’s online education platform Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing (DIKSHA).
In September, a report by The Hindu revealed that the National eGovernance Division (NeGD) is set to integrate PAL into DIKSHA and that NCERT has sought MeitY’s expertise for implementing the same. The report also said that various state governments like Andhra Pradesh are collaborating with private Ed-tech companies such as Reliance Jio Platform’s start-up Embibe, ConveGenius, and Mindspark for “training teachers to use IT applications in the classroom, provide analytics for remedial learning, and help students improve their conceptual understanding.”
Also Read:
STAY ON TOP OF TECH NEWS: Our daily newsletter with the top story of the day from MediaNama, delivered to your inbox before 9 AM. Click here to sign up today!
