SMS Push-Pull technology for M-learning and Information Services

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  Actually I finished my undergrad last December [2006]. I was doing my internship at Datasoft from September’06 to December ‘06. In the mean time I got an offer from my university to join there as an information systems analyst. It’s a great pleasure to get like this offer. I had taken a decision to join there. The responsibility of an information systems analyst is to making all the necessary development & maintances of web application and all kinds of network supports. At that time i didn’t know anything about PHP. Usually in university life, we were doing lots of programming with C/C++, Java, ASP etc but except PHP which is widely used scripting language for web application development. I remembered, in my senior project, I was working on parallel programming using JAVA RMI. It’s a huge work, I think but after finishing my senior project, I didn’t get any scope to use one line of code from that project. Okay I think may be I am going irrelevant to my topics. I will write those at later in some other head.

Now, come to the title, actually this was my third project after joining IUB. In the end of July, we took a plan that we [khalid bhai, sujan bhai & me] were working on distance learning issues. We were trying to establish some ingredient for e-learning in Bangladesh. Then we were doing some study work on that topic and finally we found our self that cell phone is most useable media for establish e-learning in Bangladesh. At present, Bangladesh has approximately 15 million 30 million cellular phone subscribers. then we were in big trouble?? How can we integrate cell phones in our educational systems? We decided to use cell phone to improve feedback process in our educational systems. How was it? Students can appear their exam using cell phone. On exam date they had to come to exam hall and they just get question paper nothing else. He or she must have a cell phone which is very common in our country. And they are submitting their answer through SMS (Short Message Service). Within a few seconds he or she gets their result via reply message. This is most instant feedback process ever done in educational systems in Bangladesh. We are proud to implement such a process in our university. It is not easy to developed but explain. So far IUB walks one step ahead from others. For pilot project we had taken one of the sections of MAT211 course in last autumn semester[2007]. We have also web based feed backing systems. for visit cilck here. It is keep all the record which delivered to the student.

When we took a decision to use sms for taking exam, we were study hard to implement this. We were very excited to develop such systems. We found we have to use a SMS GETWAY for broadcasting SMS. How we gonna manage this GETWAY.  :) At that time we got a strong help from one content provider company named “SSD-TECK“. They gave us a share of their SMS GETWAY and we were assigning a number i.e 2580 which is working for any operator in Bangladesh. I want to say, it was really an interesting one that I did in my short development life. You can try it now.

Goto your message option write “iub hello world” and sent to 2580 number from any cellular connection in Bangladesh.

And let’s see how much smart it is. at the end this semester[Autumn 2007] we can say that it is very good ingredient for establish e-learning in Bangladesh.

i believe it’s a pretty easy and cost effective to implementing automation in your organization through SMS. Currently we are thinking about this. From this semester we will publish our school’s course grade through SMS. It is very common; we have lots of students who are living outside Dhaka. After finishing their final exam they are not staying anymore at Dhaka. When grade will publishing they can not get it directly, they try to find out a friend who is staying in Dhaka and over the phone they try to get it. So isn’t it good system that he or she just sent a SMS like “IUB MYGRADE” and sent to 2580 and reply message it shows like “MAT211 – A, CSC405 – A+” etc. we can also manage notice board systems via SMS.

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Filed under E-learning, M-learning, SMS based exam, Telecommunication