HYDERABAD: Analytics from the Virtual Labs initiative released by the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIITH), has shown an increasing trend in the usage of science and engineering-related online laboratory materials over the last six months. Coinciding with the imposition of the lockdown in India, statistics show a steep rise in page views of the materials - from 628,300 in March 25 to nearly 4 million in June 2020.
“We’ve seen a surge in the number of usages due to the recent Covid-19 situation. This reiterates the importance of virtual labs for students across the country and also across the world”, says Dr. Venkatesh Choppella, Principal Investigator (PI) for Virtual Labs, IIITH. For users across the world, he is referring to the US, Colombia, the UAE, Philippines and Malaysia who are currently some of the leading non-Indian users contributing to more than 15% of the total usage. From providing remote access to labs to a complete learning management system, the Virtual Labs initiative of the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) includes additional web-resources, video-lectures, animated demonstrations and self evaluation for undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as research scholars.
This digital project which was officially kicked off in 2012 to make accessible high quality and expensive equipment to all those constrained by time, geography, and sufficiently trained teachers, sees the participation of six IITs along with other institutes such as the IIITH, Amrita Vishwa VidyaPeetham, College of Engineering, Pune, Dayalbagh Institute, and NIT Surathkal. In addition to creating content,the team at IIITH under the Virtual Labs Engineering, Architecture and Design (VLEAD) is also primarily responsible for developing and maintaining the platform which hosts over 1,000 experiments.