The Collaborative & Accessibility Platform (CAP) is an initiative of Ministry of Human Resource Department under the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NME ICT). The overall objective of this implementation is to develop and deploy all labs covered by the NME ICT Virtual Labs Project. The project involves association of 12 premier institutes partnering to build over 150 Virtual Labs with the mission to collaborate and involve many more institutes in the course of the project. Nine disciplines of science and engineering have been chosen for the project.
Each institution can use different software technologies, hardware interfacing software for remotely accessible equipment; explore the issues in the design, implementation and usage of multi-institutional shared virtual labs - at the scientific, methodological and technical levels. These are made available to the end users, i.e. learners and faculty of Indian universities to use these labs as part of the course work.
CAP allows deployment in a hosted environment and ensures secure access for learners in remote locations. It facilitates the development, user management, deployment, sharing and scalability of the platform to support hundreds of labs and thousands of users. The primary users are faculty, course developers, learners, remote lab providers and administrators.
The objective of having labs online is to provide remote-access to labs in various disciplines of Science and Engineering that cater to students at the undergraduate level, postgraduate level as well as to research scholars. It motivates students to conduct experiments by the arousing their curiosity and help them in learning basic and advanced concepts through remote experimentation. Students can avail the various tools for learning, including additional web-resources, video-lectures, animated demonstrations and self evaluation. In addition, it allows sharing of costly equipment and resources, which are otherwise available to limited number of users due to constraints on time and geographical distances.
With the present day internet and computer technologies conducting joint experiments by two participating institutions and also sharing costly resources have been made possible. This help in learning basic and advanced concepts through remote experimentation. Today most equipment has a computer interface for control and data storage. This it is possible to design good experiments around some of this equipment which would enhance the learning of a student. Internet-based experimentation further permits use of resources – knowledge, software, and data available on the web, apart from encouraging skilful experiments being simultaneously performed at points separated in space.