Virtual Board: A Digital Writing Platform for Effective Teaching-Learning

With the advent of a global pandemic, the world changed drastically with a wave of new technologies. The teaching learning process also saw an overwhelming change, where both teachers and students communicated via online. To facilitate such interactions, several tools were developed. Many online video conferencing platforms were vividly used starting from Google Meet to Microsoft Teams, etc. A new approach demands usage of new techniques, software, hardware and often platforms. The specific task of writing in a teaching learning scenario is of eminent importance and it often requires using hardware extensions such as digital writing pads, stylus, etc. Such external hardware devices can be categorised based on how easy and effective they are for communication. Adopting the basic feature of air tapping in head-mounted displays such as Microsoft Hololens for augmented reality applications, here we devised a platform which enables a person to write on a virtual board. To be specific, we proposed a system called virtual board, that enables a person to write “in-the-air” using a pointing device and which automatically translates into text. This enhances the task of writing in a teaching learning scenario. To justify its usability, we performed a subjective test. Participants were asked to perform a similar task both on our proposed virtual board and also on a commonly used digital writing pad. A post-session questionnaire was provided to the participants based on the experiment. Results obtained after analysing the feedback in form of responses clearly showcase that the developed system is truly accepted in terms of the ease of learning and writing, and its effectiveness in a virtual teaching learning environment.