Learning Design
Teams study learner needs, educational objectives, accessibility constraints, language contexts, and assessment goals before committing to features.
CET, IIT Bombay
ET617 Educational App Design
ET617 is a client-driven, project-based course where student teams design, build, test, and document educational applications for authentic learning contexts. The course connects software engineering, learning design, user research, accessibility, responsible AI, and stakeholder communication.
About the Course
Students work with external clients such as teachers, schools, NGOs, ed-tech organizations, researchers, and academic partners to turn educational needs into working app prototypes.
Software Practice
Projects use agile planning, GitHub repositories, issue tracking, sprint reviews, testing evidence, and deployment documentation.
Responsible Innovation
Security, ethics, responsible AI, anti-plagiarism, IPR clarity, DPDP awareness, and inclusive design are treated as project requirements.
People Behind ET617
ET617 is shaped by CET faculty, mentors, client partners, external evaluators, and the INNOAIED collaboration between IIT Bombay and NTNU.
The course is currently led by Prof. Ramkumar Rajendran, with support from Mr. Aditya Rajmane as Teaching Assistant.
Course and Research Leads
Faculty frame the course, recruit project partners, guide the teaching team, supervise research connections, and lead evaluation and improvement across offerings.
Weekly Guidance
Mentors review progress, inspect working builds, help students manage scope, surface risks early, and support productive team-client conversations.
Clients and Evaluators
Clients bring real problems and feedback. External experts and industry partners help students test whether their prototypes are educationally meaningful and practically useful.
Mentor and Team Workflow
Mentors meet with teams weekly to review progress, inspect working builds, and encourage good engineering habits. Teams should regularly reflect on learner needs, client feedback, risks, and evidence of feature success.
Responsibilities
Review team progress, ask clarifying questions, encourage good engineering habits, help manage scope, and flag risks early.
Weekly Meetings
Check sprint commitments, inspect the current build, discuss blockers, review upcoming work, and record action items in meeting minutes.
Reflection Prompts
Teams should regularly ask what learner need matters most, what client feedback changed, which issue is highest risk, and what evidence shows the feature works.
Policies and Resources
Policies and resources are integrated here instead of living on separate navigation pages.
Protect systems and users
Do not commit secrets. Avoid unnecessary permissions. Use safe authentication patterns and document data flows.
Design for inclusion
Use semantic HTML, readable contrast, keyboard access, clear labels, and inclusive content decisions.
Use AI with care
Disclose AI-assisted work where required, validate generated outputs, avoid overclaiming, and protect user data.
Credit all sources
Attribute code, media, text, datasets, prompts, and external libraries. Unauthorized copying is not acceptable.
Clarify ownership early
Discuss licensing, reuse, client expectations, open-source plans, and repository visibility before handover.
Core Infrastructure
Use Moodle, the course WhatsApp Community, shared documents, and the EAD-Labs GitHub organization for course coordination and handover.
Compendium: The ET617 compendium is the full guide for students, clients, instructors, and mentors.
CompendiumSemester Timeline Preview
The full timeline converts the implementation plan into phase-based milestones and weekly deliverables.
Client and course preparation
Client requests, project proposal evaluation, onboarding kit, mentor preparation, and course launch in the last week of July.
Orientation, discovery, and prototype
Team formation, stakeholder interviews, requirements report, low-fidelity design, and early working prototype.
Iterative development
Mid-semester review, client feedback, sprint builds, usability feedback, testing, accessibility improvements, and documentation.
Symposium and wrap-up
Final demonstration, project report, repository handover, reflection, client-facing presentation, evaluation, and course-improvement notes.