Events & Seminars

SESSION- I

The first technical session started with the speech by Prof. Mangala Sunder on the importance of National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA-NC). He said that NPTEL is a joint initiative of IITs and IISc which comprises of various web and video courses. The program is funded by Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, New Delhi. NPTEL is one of the best open course wares in the world and it is the most subscribed education channel in You Tube as per the user statistics as on June 2012. The contents for more than 1000 courses are being developed in the fields of Sciences, Engineering, Technology, Humanities and Management under NPTEL. Online examination, online certification, online tutoring are also the main features of the mission. The course contents are supplemented with quizzes, self- evaluation, assignments, lecture handouts and FAQs. As add- on advanced text search, text of videos and subtitles in videos are being enabled. NPTEL awareness and course-specific workshops are also conducted for students as well as teachers. He mentioned that the goal of NPTEL is to create a virtual university in partnership with industry and Government to offer world class technical education to all the students. Prof. Mangala Sunder ended his speech wishing that ‘Ordinary effort guided by an extraordinary mission’ will lead us to a better tomorrow.

SESSION - II

The second session was about Virtual labs and its contributions in educational society. In his inspiring lecture Prof. Ranjan Bose said that Virtual lab is a remote experimentation platform for science and engineering discourses which started in 2009 by MHRD under NMEICT. It aims at promoting remote access labs, to cater to the needs of students at UG, PG levels as well as the research scholars and to arouse the curiosity among them to perform labs and to provide complete learning management system where the students can avail various tools for learning, including additional web- resources, video-lectures, animated demonstration and self- evaluation. Virtual labs can also be used to complement physical labs and enables the user to perform experiments remotely as an on-demand service over the web. The setup for performing virtual labs includes one computer terminal with broadband internet connectivity. The main advantage of using virtual labs is its freedom to the users to make mistakes while performing the test. Prof. Bose also mentioned the various types of virtual labs like Remote Triggered, Measured-Based and Modeling/Simulation-Based.

SESSION -III

The third session was about T10KT project under NMIECT, and the lecture was delivered by Prof. Deepak. B. Pathak. He talked about the need for training a large number of teachers in the professional higher education sector in India. There is, no doubt, a dearth of qualified and experienced teachers. He key pointed that as India moves to increase the Gross Enrollment Ratio in coming years, the need for quality teachers would also be increased and the supply-demand gap will widen further.

SESSION -IV

The fourth session was about accessing educational devices like AAKASH-II, Scilaband Spoken Tutorial. Prof. Kannan. M. Moudgalya delivered a captivating lecture onwhy there is a the need to switch on to AAKASH II tablet from AAKASH Itablet . He discussed some of the key specifications of AAKASH II, like OS Android 4.0.4, ROM 4 GB, RAM 512 MB, CPU 1 GHz etc. Further he mentioned about the text book companion using Scilab. It has activities that code all relevant worked out examples of standard textbooks. It is a supplementary study material and serves as a Scilab document for the textbook. Scilab is a FOSS used for numerical computation and is an excellent alternative to MATLAB and it provides a powerful computing environment for engineering & scientific applications. It also includes XCOS which is an open source alternative to Simulink. The session also covered the area of spoken tutorials. Spoken tutorial is a video recording of a computer session through audio and visual means. Spoken tutorials are created for self- learning and hence promote active learning.

SESSION - V

The final technical session was about e-Yantra, which is a project to spread education in Embedded Systems and Robotics by IITB and sponsored by MHRD through the NMEICT. Prof. Kavi Arya delivered a lecture on importance of this project. He mentioned that a person who solves the societal problems with the help of technology can only be called an engineer. He pointed that e-Yantra Lab set-up Initiative (eLSI) aims to enable colleges to teach Robotics and Embedded System in an effective manner. It includes training teams of 4 teachers from colleges in the basics of Embedded Systems Theory and Micro-Controller Programming through a 2-day workshop, engaging these teams through the regional e-Yantra Robotics Teacher Competition and providing support and advice to set up a Robotics lab. By the time the teachers are trained, the lab will be available at the college for the teachers to get their students involved through projects.

The conference ended with High Tea and Networking Session.