Virtual Laboratory, Phase II

PI: Prof. Kantesh Balani

In the Phase-II of Virtual Lab, idea is to make all the developed labs into an open source repository that is available to community/academic institutes, whether in India or abroad, for use and development. The idea now is to convert all the licensed content into a platform that is independent of any licensed software. Further, a target is set for creating as many nodal centers in and around Kanpur and achieve a participation of over 54,000 users by the end of year 2015. Since physical distances are no more a constraint in today's technological world, the lack of infrastructure/ resources in many educational institutions can be overcome through online demonstration/operation of sophisticated instruments. Good teaching and web-based video courses (complementing the NPTEL lectures) can serve as a useful resource for upcoming colleges and, thus, imparting a quality education through the use of technology. After the successful conclusion of the pilot phase (remote trigger based experiments), and a second phase (the Main Phase where a large number of simulation based laboratory experiments have been developed), now the direction is towards outreach of these labs making them openly and easily accessible to the community. These Internet-based experiments permits use of resources – knowledge, software, and data available on the web, apart from encouraging skillful experiments being simultaneously performed at points separated in space (and possibly, time). And by opening these labs to community, the usage will continue to increase and will automatically invite community to develop the labs and make learning through technology better.