Digital courseware is a school's curriculum in software form: the lessons, videos, animations, exercises and tests for each class and subject. A teacher plays it on the classroom screen and assigns parts of it as homework. The curriculum is what children are taught through the school year. Courseware is that curriculum turned into material that a screen can show and that software can mark.
In many Indian schools, each classroom now has a smart class: a large screen or an interactive panel at the front, on which the teacher can play lessons and write. The courseware is arranged by board, class, subject and chapter. So a CBSE Class 6 science teacher opens her own board's Class 6 science chapters, in the same order as the NCERT textbook that the class uses. Courseware for state boards follows each state's textbooks, often in the state's language.
Take, for example, a Class 6 science teacher at a school in Coimbatore who is teaching magnets. She opens the chapter on the screen. A three-minute animation shows how the two ends of a magnet attract or push away other magnets. She pauses it and asks the class to predict what happens when two north ends meet. Then the screen shows a short quiz of five questions. The children answer on paper, and she enters how many chose each answer. Most children get four questions right, but 18 of 40 get the question on north and south poles wrong. So she replays that part of the animation and explains it again.
At the end of the lesson, she assigns ten practice questions as homework. The homework is sent through the school's learning management system (LMS), the system where each class's assignments are set and submitted. The next morning, she sees each child's score. Questions on the weak topic go into the children's practice on an adaptive learning platform, which chooses each child's next question from that child's answers.
Who pays, and how? A school usually pays the courseware company a fee for each student each year, and sometimes buys the screens from the same company. The contract runs for several years, because teachers need time to learn a new programme and do not change it often.
Some courseware is built on a digital content platform for education, which stores the lessons and serves them to many schools. Courseware also links to other material, such as books in a digital library for children and lesson plans for robotics kits. Courseware that changes the next question for each child uses adaptive learning.
How is courseware different from an LMS? The LMS is the place where the class's work is set, submitted and marked. The courseware is the teaching material itself. A school can run one company's courseware inside another company's LMS.