NMEICT

A One day Faculty Orientation seminar based on the proceedings of the NMEICT Dissemination Workshop for NCR Engineering Colleges conducted by AICTE, MHRD, Govt. of India on 8th October, 2013 at New Delhi, was organized at Dronacharya Group of Institutions, Greater Noida on 12th October 2013. The Participants of the workshop, conducted seminar sessions based on the various projects being run under the prestigious National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT), launched by the Ministry of Human Resources and Development, Government of India.

The Seminar encompassed five sessions beginning with an introduction to the Virtual labs by Mr. T. Bothichander, Faculty, Department of ME. In his presentation Mr. Bothichander outlined the importance of using virtual labs in the present scenario, and the vision preceding their establishment. The highlight of the presentation was a live demonstration of the Learning Management System around the Virtual Labs animated demonstrations in the domain of Mechanical Engineering.

Ms. Sona Simon from Civil Engg. Department deliberated on Mission Sakshat, envisioned to facilitate lifelong learning for students, teachers and those in employment or in pursuit of knowledge free of cost to them. She also introduced the audience to NPTEL, which provides E-learning through online Web and Video courses in Engineering, Science and humanities streams. She demonstrated the online lecture content on NPTEL, and its usefulness in the classroom including well researched video lectures.

The next session covered the AAKASH II project and Scilab, presented by Mr. Rajiv Ranjan from EEE department. Since the Mission (NMEICT) is meant for higher education and targets affordability for all, the AAKASH device has all the capabilities required by a student, including Wi Fi, streaming video (to play NPTEL lectures), ebook reader etc., along with various open source educational software packages like Scilab etc. Using this device, students can also access all the content created under the other components of NMEICT like Virtual labs. Features were added or removed keeping in mind that the 2 key objectives–enabling education and keeping the price low.

Mr. Prakash Chandra Meshram, Department of ECE presented the Spoken Tutorial, an initiative of the ‘Talk to a Teacher’ activity of the NMEICT. He shared that the objective of establishing the Spoken Tutorial Resource Centre is to conduct Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) workshops on different courses like Linux, Latex, Scilab, Python, PHP - MySQL, Lotus, etc. at various colleges and schools, designed in a highly conducive way to self-learning.

The last session by Mr. Manoj Kumar Yadav included discussion on the e-Yantra project. He explained the basic ideology behind the e-Yantra as to enable effective Embedded systems and Robotics education across engineering colleges in India, by-

• Providing training for teachers and students.
• Engaging teachers and students in hands-on experiments with robots.
• Helping colleges to set-up Robotics labs/clubs.

Ashwani Kumar, Administrator (Academics) concluded the sessions, with an advice to all faculty members to not only use Virtual Lab and NPTEL courses in class room, but also to prepare video lecture and contribute to this noble pursuit of Education for All mission of the Govt. of India.