On March 23, 2018, Amrita’s Virtual Laboratories and its deployment outcomes won the GOLC Online Lab Award 2018 for visualized experiment category. The nomination was titled “vlab – Sustainable Laboratory Skill Education through Free Online Labs and Connecting Teachers and Students across the Country” and recognizes the efforts in deploying free educational tools and promoting its outreach across students, professors and institutions and included Dr. Shyam Diwakar, the Institute Integration Coordinator of Amrita Virtual Labs ; Dr. Krishnashree Achuthan, the Principal Investigator of the project; Dr. Bipin Nair, the Discipline-wise National Coordinator of Biotechnology and Biomedical Engineering Virtual Labs for the National Mission Project; Dr. Prema Nedungadi, Director of AmritaCREATE and Dr. Raghu Raman, Chairman, Amrita School of Business, Coimbatore, who had jointly led the project, its design, implementation and studies.
Presented by Dr. Alexander Kist of University of Southern Queensland, Australia and Dr. Michale Auer, the Founding President of IAOE, on behalf of Global Online Laboratory Consortium (GOLC), the GOLC Online Lab award (Visualized Experiments category) to Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, the award was received by Dr. Shyam Diwakar at the 15th International Conference on Remote Engineering and Virtual Instrumentation (REV 2018) held at the University of Applied Sciences, Dusseldorf, Germany, from March 21-24, 2018.
The International Association of Online Engineering (IAOE) is an international non-profit organization with the objective of encouraging the wider development, distribution, and application of Online Engineering (OE) technologies and its influence on society. The recognition puts Amrita on top of all of the world’s online laboratory resources. It recognizes Amrita’s role in promoting the development, sharing, and research into remotely accessible laboratories for educational use and for increasing interest in developing and deploying online labs for sustainable goals in education.
Dr. Shyam Diwakar also presented a talk titled, “Using Learning Theory for Assessing Effectiveness of Laboratory Education Delivered via a Web-based Platform”, at the event on March 24, 2018. Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham has developed over 360 virtual labs now freely available online that are being used by more than three hundred and eight thousand registered users across India for higher education and laboratory skill training. The paper was authored by Dr. Shyam Diwakar, Rakhi Radhamani, Nijin Nizar, Dhanush Kumar, Dr. Bipin Nair of Amrita School of Biotechnology and Dr. Krishnashree Achuthan of Amrita School of Engineering.
Virtual Amrita Laboratories Universalizing Education (VALUE) project is a multi-faculty, interdisciplinary project and has not only implemented these online educational resources but also connected to 104+ colleges across the country through its nodal center program. Many research publications suggest how these virtual labs act as interactive textbooks and improve teaching and student learning in and outside classrooms. The paper at REV conference showcased that virtual lab-based learning enhanced classroom education and variations in thinking processes among learners.
