Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham’s Dr. Shyam Diwakar presented on “Virtual Labs in India” at the Online Labs Workshop organized by Prof. Michael Auer and Danilo Zutin from CTI, Villach, Austria on Jan 10, 2016 at Pune. The preconference workshop was scheduled during the Third International Conference on Transformations in Engineering Education, organized by College of Engineering, Pune.

Dr. Romita Shine, represented Prof. Prema Nedungadi, and presented Amrita CREATE’s wide range of simulation-based STEM projects for both schools and higher education such as MedSIM, the Collaborative Platform for Virtual and Remote Labs, and OLabs. A demo of MedSim, which consists of medically accurate activities embedded in virtual patient cases elicited great interest and lively discussions.

The Online Lab workshop organized by International Association of Online Engineering (IAOE) and the Global Online Laboratory Consortium (GOLC) started with Prof. Michael Auer’s introduction on remote and online labs in Europe and their growth and evolution via various initiatives. Dr. Danilo Zutin of IGIP also talked on remote lab management systems and cited a few implementations of online labs on such architectures.

Dr. Shyam Diwakar’s hour-long talk was on Government of India’s Virtual Labs project and included a demo.  Virtual Labs is a National Mission project where Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham jointly participates with IIT Delhi, IIT Kanpur, IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Guwahati, IIT Roorkee, IIIT Hyderabad, NIT Suratkal, COE Pune and Dayalbagh University. The talk covered all aspects of virtual labs in the context of the National Virtual Labs project and showcased the ongoing phase where all 800+ online labs from all partners will be integrated under one open source platform.

The workshop had participants from academia and industry including some startups working on online engineering. At the end of talks, Prof. Michael Auer felicitated both the Amrita speakers on behalf of the local organizers of the conference.

All of Amrita 300+ virtual labs experiments are freely available via vlab.amrita.edu. Amrita’s OLabs covers the entire Physics, Chemistry and Biology experiments for Class 9-12 for Indian Schools and has over 90000 users with over 8000 teachers trained in using the labs www.amrita.edu/olabs. Amrita’s recently launched MedSIM is available free of cost to medical students at www.amrita.edu/medsim.