GURU: An Experimental Interactive Environment for Teachers/Learners

The significance of technology in today's education is inevitable for teachers to design interactive environments based on learning methodologies and for learners to interact, explore and create personal animations, stories and games to learn a topic. Even with rapid advances in the field of end-user programming and software engineering, teachers/learners often spend considerable effort for using technology to support their activities. While there are many end-user environments like Scratch, Alice and so on, their focus is on programming but our need is to design these kinds of environments to support adult literacy in India, which is our target group. In this paper, we present GURU, a prototype environment for both teachers/learners alike to enrich their teaching/learning experience. GURU has two unique aspects: It is designed for teachers with minimal technical expertise and it strongly aligns with learning methodologies. It is based on IDont framework that uses ontologies for capturing different aspects of adult literacy instructional design. In this short paper, we present the design of GURU as a teachers' environment. GURU is essentially a web based authoring environment for creating adult literacy eLearning content but points to the need for such kinds of environments for subjects other than programming.