Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham participated in the World Engineering Education Forum (WEEF) 2015 held at Palazzo dei Congressi, Florence, Italy from September 20-24, 2015. This year’s WEEF focused on “Engineering Education for a Resilient Society” and anticipated that climate change adaptation, natural disasters, growing population and urbanization, biotechnologies, and water and food crises will be attracting priority attention of all Engineering Education stakeholders now and into the future.

VALUE Virtual Labs team presented a paper titled “Role of ICT Enabled Virtual Laboratories in Biotechnology Education: Case Studies on Blended and Remote Learning” at the 18th International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (‪‎ICL2015‬) organized within the WEEF meeting. The Amrita paper was authored by Shyam Diwakar, Rakhi Radhamani, Hemalatha Sasidharakurup, Dhanush Kumar, Bipin Nair, Krishnashree Achuthan and was presented by Dr. Shyam Diwakar of Amrita School of Biotechnology who showed how students perceived virtual Labs education based on workshops conducted. Sakshat Amrita Virtual Lab is a National Mission Project of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham along with partners IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Madras, IIT Roorkee, IIT Guwahati, Dayalbagh University, College of Engineering Pune and NIT Karnataka. The paper also showed case studies based on virtual labs usage from workshops conducted by Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham.

Engineering Education (EE) Societies, student organisations, EE associations and networks, and multi-national companies and industries like Airbus, Quaser, Mathworks and others promoting new tools/methods for education gathered together at the event. The Conference also had participating organizations like IFEES, IELA, COPI, EEDC/SEFI, IGIP, IIDEA, BEST, SPEED who rolled out their recognition and awards at the event.

Full paper is available here.