Online teaching platform designed by IIT-Bombay now available to all school, college teachers

An online teaching platform developed by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Bombay is now available to teachers of all schools and colleges in the country.

An online teaching platform developed by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Bombay is now available to teachers of all schools and colleges in the country.

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BodhiTree is a multimedia platform designed by the computer science engineering department of IIT-Bombay that can mimic classroom teaching. While most tools such as massive open online courses (MOOC) are designed to help students, BodhiTree is built with the aim of aiding teachers in their instructions.

Under the current circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic, most educational institutes including IITs have switched to online mode of instruction. To help teachers adapt to the challenge and integrate technology in their teachings, IIT-Bombay has made it available to all.

“BodhiTree is open sourced and free to use. It is also very easy to install. Individual colleges or schools can install and host an independent instance of BodhiTree either on their premises or on the cloud, with full control over the students’/ teachers’ data and content,” said Subhasis Chaudhuri, director, IIT-Bombay.

The platform hosts interactive multimedia books including lab manuals. These books — called BodhiBooks — are curated by the faculty of IIT-Bombay and can be in the form of interactive videos, auto-graded practice sheets and auto or manual graded lab exercises. By adopting this platform, teachers can manage multiple tasks such as creating their own content, enrol students, impose schedules, monitor students’ progress, take tests and share marks with students, and check for plagiarism.

“Teachers can use the BodhiBooks in conjunction with the rich set of learning management system (LMS) features. The platform has a particularly good support system for engineering colleges with virtual labs and software labs,” Chaudhuri added. Currently the platform is being used by science and technology colleges including Walchand Institute of Technology, Solapur, and National Institute of Technology, Goa.

“We hope this IIT-Bombay innovation helps the nation in getting through the current hardship,” he said.

Instructors can sign up for a free demo for adopting the platform in their school, college or individually. While individual accounts for instructors are free of cost, the institute charges a nominal price for schools and institutes depending on the courses they choose.