An initiative of the Ministry of Human Resources Department under the National Mission on Education through ICT, Amrita’s Collaborative Accessibility Platform for Virtual Labs (Amrita CAP-VL) provides a framework for the development and deployment of distributed virtual labs that use diverse software and interfacing technology. It support the system architectures for remote equipment labs and addresses scheduling, networking, security and scalability.
CAP-VL provides tools to further India’s National Mission projects in STEM skills: the building over 125 Online Labs for schools and over 200 Virtual Labs for higher education in undergraduate- and postgraduate-level experiments. CAP-VL optimizes the development and deployment costs and ensures a rich, consistent learning experience. Its multi-tier, scalable architecture allows virtual labs builders to focus on their experiments. Its modules (VL workbench, collaborative content management, repositories) have axiomatically-designed interfaces that bring speed and efficiency to design. Its integration of user-management tasks (single sign-on, role-based access control, etc.) enhances flexibility without compromising security.
The key accomplishments include its application of simulation and its provision of easily usable authoring tools, pre-configured templates, and management and assessment modules for instructors and support of mobile devices. CAP-VL’s support of multiple deployment models, including the cloud, hosted, and mixed models, ensures scalable and reliable usage in hosted environments, and secure access to remote equipment labs. The highly scalable architecture has resulted in its use as the underlying platform for two nationwide projects, Amrita OLabs and Virtual Labs with a total of 240,000 registered users and over 75,000 weekly users (including registered and unregistered). We also developed 125 simulations labs for OLabs, 200+ simulation labs for Virtual Labs that are integrated into the AmritaCAP platform. Faculty members from various institutes and disciplines has used the platform to develop and deploy labs and get insights into lab usage by learners. CAP-VL supports labs in multiple languages, with OLabs being offered in English, Hindi, Marathi and Malayalam.
Amrita CAP-VL unifies India’s school and higher education labs with the following innovative features.
