“VIRTUAL LABS UNIVERSALIZING EDUCATION – NMEICT PROJECT” – AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM

Project Category: Higher Education Sub Category: Innovation In Open And Distance Learning Reference No. WES2013/awards/101   Details of the Applicant: Name: Krishnashree Achuthan Designation: Professor Organization: Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham Address: Clappana P.O. City: Kollam State: Kerala Country:India Zip Code: 690525   Organization Website: vlab.amrita.edu

 

Details of the Agency implementing the Project/Initiative:

Name of the Organization: Amrita University, IIT Delhi, IIT Kharaghpur, IIT Mumbai, IIT Chennai, IIT Guwahati, Dayalbagh University, COE, Pune

Website: http://www.vlab.co.in/

Details of Programme /Project/Initiative:

 

Brief Description:

Good lab facilities and up-to-date lab experiments are critical for any engineering or science college. Also, good teachers are always a scarce resource. The Virtual Labs project addresses these issues of lack of good lab facilities, as well as trained teachers, by making remote experimentation possible. Also, in a country such as ours, costly instruments and equipment need to be shared with fellow researchers to the extent possible. Another objective of this project is to arouse the curiosity of the students and permit them to learn at their own pace. This facilitates the absorption of basic and advanced concepts through remote experimentation. Internet based experimentation further permits use of resources – knowledge, software, and data available on the web. In this project, web-enabled experiments have been designed for remote operation and viewing. Specifically, the Virtual labs provide the following: (a) Access to quality labs to those engineering colleges that lack these lab facilities. (b) Access to quality labs as a complementary facility to those colleges that already have labs (c) A complete Learning management System around these labs (d) Teacher-training and skill-set augmentation through workshops and on-site training. Virtual Labs project was ‘Dedicated to the Nation’ by Honourable Minister for HRD on 23 Feb 2012. To date this is the largest initiative in the world to have successfully developed and implemented approximately 200 labs in nine.

 

Objective:

The main objectives of the Virtual Labs project are as follows:

1. To provide remote-access to labs in various disciplines of Science and Engineering.
2. To cater to students at the UG level, PG level as well as to research scholars.
3. To enable the students to learn at their own pace, and to arouse their curiosity.
4. To provide a complete Learning Management System that includes web-resources, video-lectures, animated demonstrations and self evaluation. The intended beneficiaries of the projects are:
5. All students and Faculty Members of Science and Engineering Colleges who do not have access to good lab‐facilities.
6. High‐school students, whose inquisitiveness will be triggered, possibly motivating them to take up higher‐studies.
7. Researchers in different institutes who can collaborate / share equipment and resources.
8. Different engineering colleges, who can benefit from the content and related teaching resources.

 

Target Group: Higher Education Engineering and Science Students

 

Geographical Reach within India: All States Across India

 

Geographical Reach outside India: Lot of Interest from U.S., Middle-East, Australia

 

Date From which the Project became Operational: 22-2-2012

 

Is the Project still operational?: Yes

 

List 5 achievements of the programme/project/initiative:

 

1. Largest venture in the world to build Virtual Laboratories – Built 1500 experiments that are simulations, interactive animations and remotely triggered in nature
2. Broad Multiple disciplines of sciences and engineering (CSE, ECE, EE, Mech Eng, Civil Eng, Chemical Eng., Biotechnology & Biomedical Eng, Physical Sciences, Chemical Sciences ) have been covered as part of this initiative
3. The features offered include Experiment, Procedure, Lab manual, Pre‐ and Post‐experiment quizzes, additional Lab resources, in addition to the Virtual Lab experiment.The experiments overlap UG and PG curricula of Indian Higher Education institutes – to allow usage by every science and engineering student in India
4. Over 1000 institutions have been trained on use of Virtual Labs
5. The platform allows on the spot assessment of student knowledge.

 

List 5 Key challenges faced while implementing the project/programme/initiative and how they were overcome:

 

1. Selecting the experiments so that they augment physical labs and class lectures. Since different universities follow differing curricula, a complete survey of syllabus had to be taken from across various large government and private university syllabus. This was then analyzed for overlapping experiments.
2. Maintenance of Quality, Accuracy and Depth of content – Several periodic reviews were done by external experts. Feedback from the review panel and end users were fed back to the faculty
3. Subject matter experts were spread across India and were not web savvy to build html content pages. A web-based authoring platform was made available for easy content publishing by subject matter experts. This allowed multiple experts to contribute as well.
4. Challenges with Dissemination – The concept of nodal centers was developed so that the nodal center institutes were leaders in their community to adopt this innovative technology and share it with the community. Today over 65 nodal centers exist in the country and they are growing.
5. Adoption of faculty-oriented syllabus. Since the deployment was Nation-wide, one of the major design issues was the choice of syllabus. Each discipline with its variety of laboratory experiments and styles was adopted into this project with the core target of having a common set of experiments usable throughout the country and in par with global laboratory-scape.

 

Videos : http://www.youtube.com/user/amritavlab

PPT :http://vlab.amrita.edu/Documentation/Virtual%20Labs.pptx

 

Documents URL:

 

http://digitallearning.eletsonline.com/2012/02/virtual-labs-project-launched-by-mhrd-under-nmeict/
http://newindianexpress.com/states/kerala/article342675.ece