IIT Kanpur Hosts National Conference on Virtual Labs, Spotlighting India's Digital Education Milestones
IIT Kanpur hosted a National Conference on Virtual Labs, highlighting India's success stories in digital education and showcasing the transformative impact
IIT Kanpur Hosts National Conference on Virtual Labs
The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur hosted the National Conference on Virtual Labs, underscoring the transformative role of India’s digital learning tools in higher education. Organised under the Ministry of Education’s flagship Virtual Labs initiative, the two-day conference brought together over 200 participants, including educators, developers, students, and service providers.
The event featured a plenary talk, keynote addresses, expert lectures, and panel discussions, exploring cutting-edge themes such as artificial intelligence, evolving pedagogies, user experience design, and the rising significance of remote and virtual experimentation in the academic landscape.
The event was inaugurated by Prof. Manindra Agrawal, Director of IIT Kanpur. Distinguished speakers included Prof. Ranjan Bose, National Coordinator of the Virtual Labs Project and Director of Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi, along with Prof. Tarun Gupta, Dean of R&D at IIT Kanpur. Additionally, Prof. Kantesh Balani, Principal Investigator and Coordinator of the Virtual Labs Conference at IIT Kanpur, addressed the audience, encouraging virtual lab users to step into the role of developers by contributing new experiments that bridge existing gaps in supplementing theory courses.
Prof. Manindra Agrawal, Director of IIT Kanpur, highlighted the objective of expanding access to virtual experiments for students across the country. He said, “The Virtual Labs Consortium aims to provide students access to a virtual environment through which they can conduct experiments. We also encourage the consortium to make these labs available in Hindi and other regional languages to create virtual lab environment as close to reality as possible. My best wishes to the Virtual Lab Consortium in their future endeavors.”
Prof. Ranjan Bose from IIIT Delhi provided an overview of the Virtual Labs project, developed under the Ministry of Education’s National Mission on Education through ICT. The initiative features over 175 Virtual Labs comprising more than 1,700 web-enabled experiments accessible for remote use. Prof. Tarun Gupta noted that IIT Kanpur has successfully onboarded over 120 colleges as nodal centres, significantly expanding the reach and impact of the Virtual Labs initiative.
Yes, IIT Kanpur offer the most spacious hostels and the largest rooms for the students along with 22 hours of eating facilities available in the campus ranging from some well-known food chains to hostel canteens which are well-stocked. Every hostel has a basketball court, few badminton courts, a volleyball court, table tennis room, a television room, a computer room, a reading room for newspaper, magazines, journals, etc., and a hall office to handle hostel affairs.
Yes, IIT Kanpur also offers an option of a dual degree, i.e., Bachelors-Masters Dual Degree to the students. A student earns both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree at the end of this five-year course. The dual degree programme has three categories:
- Category A: In this case, both degrees are in the same discipline/department. Example: BTech-M Tech.
- Category B: This is a two-discipline/ department programme where the bachelor’s degree is in the parent discipline/ department and the master’s degree is in a different discipline/ department. Thus, three combinations are possible in this category, ex: BTech-M Tech, BTech-MS and BTech-MDes. Students can choose any one of the aforementioned combinations.
- Category C: In this case, the bachelor’s degree is in the parent discipline/ department and the master’s degree is MBA. Ex: BTech-MBA.
“It was great to share and experience human stories behind the virtual labs”, said Prof. Venkatesh Choppella from IIIT Hyderabad. “This IIT Kanpur event has allowed us to be part of the developers from many institutions in this part of India and to see how to engage users and make them developers of such online tools’, said Prof. Shyam Diwakar from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham.
With emerging technologies such as AI/ML, AR/VR, gamification, and large language models reshaping the landscape of digital education, participants engaged in discussions on innovations aimed at further personalising and democratising virtual learning. The conference concluded with a certificate distribution ceremony and a feedback session, where participants emphasised the growing need for multilingual virtual labs, adaptive learning management systems, and integrated assessment and grading tools.
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