Virtual labs to provide remote access to laboratories online
Shreya Arora
‘Ask a Question’, an initiative for answering queries on engineering and science was one of the digital projects launched at the ‘Digital India Initiative’ that began at IIT Bombay on Thursday. The queries will be answered by professors of IIT Bombay.
According to those associated with the project, the initiative that began over four years ago is aimed at sharing the expertise of IIT Bombay faculty members and improve standards of engineering education in India.
On Thursday, the institute showcased projects for digitisation in education. The National Mission on Education through ICT, Ministry of Human Resource Development, has supported many of the projects.
Describing three major elements of digitising education, IIT Bombay Prof Kannan M Mougdalya said that content must be generated and made available and must be pushed and promoted to ensure it reaches people. “There should be affordable devices that can be used to access this content. Various projects displayed meet all these requirements,” said Mougdalya.
Among the projects was ‘Virtual Labs’ to provide remote access to laboratories through online medium. Pushpdeep Mishra, project manager, said: “We have animation and interaction-based virtual labs that can be accessed on computers. We also have some remote triggered labs in which controls used elsewhere could be used to conduct actual operations in a lab far away.” He said there were many limitations in a physical lab and they wanted to make experiments available to everyone.
“We aim to reach the grassroots. We have a community development programme where we are training students, who in turn will teach other students on how to use the labs,” added Mishra.
Further, the institute had on display its ‘train 1000 teachers’ project through which teachers are trained via live transmission and interactive video-chats. The aim is to enhance teaching skills of faculty in core engineering and science subjects. The content of the workshops is released on an ‘open source’ platform from where it can be viewed and downloaded freely.
Stating the need for the digital India initiative, Mougdalya said those who do not have access to a lot of digital resources, automatically become ‘second’ class citizens. “This gap needs to be bridged,” he added. Projects such as ‘spoken tutorials’ and free and open source software for education, said officials, aim at providing easily accessible online courses and content in various Indian languages.