Virtual Labs under NMEICT

Virtual Labs is an ICT based education initiative of Ministry of Human Resource Development GOI, to provide easily accessible and high quality education laboratories online throughout the country in science and engineering. It is a collection of 91 virtual (online) laboratories containing hundreds of experiments in nine disciplines of science and engineering is. It is a part of National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT).

Virtual Labs’ primary focus is to provide graduate and undergraduate college and university students with the ability to perform their required laboratory experiments using only the World Wide Web, a standard computer, and an Internet connection. Virtual Labs also allows the sharing of costly equipment across the country, and in rural areas, students will be able to perform experiments that they would not otherwise be able to access.

• The Pilot Phase of the Virtual Labs project started in April 2009.
• The Main Phase began in April 2010 and over 80 Virtual Labs have been developed, and finally launched in 2012. Two types of virtual labs have been developed under this project.
• In the Simulation Based Virtual Labs the experiments are modelled using mathematical equations.
• The simulations are carried out remotely at a high-end server, and the results are communicated to the student over the Internet.
• The other being the Remote Triggered Virtual Labs where the actual experiments are triggered remotely. The output of the experiment (being conducted remotely) is communicated back to the student over the Internet. This class of Virtual Labs gives the student the output of real-time experiments.