IoT Technologies to Enhance Precision and Response Time of Mobile-Based Educational Assessments

"Smart Education" is one key application domain for IoT. However, more often than not, the term smart education is used as a synonym for use of conventional e-learning systems like MOOCs, etc. IoT's potential, however, goes far beyond the capabilities of current systems. IoT offers innovative ways of processing and collecting sensor data from distributed locations, network architectures to deliver the data effectively, and use of Big Data techniques to analyze this data for meaningful decision-making. This paper presents the design and implementation of a mobile/tablet-based assessment system that uses the MQTT publish-subscribe architecture to provide almost real-time assessment services to various types of educational stakeholders including teachers, principals, parents and educational planners. The system delivers and collects assessment data including sensor information from mobile devices used by teachers and students. The system routes analytics results generated from analytical engines to appropriate stakeholders in real-time. Preliminary analysis of the proposed system shows promising results in terms of low power consumption in mobile devices and good scalability.