The advent of Internet and the World Wide Web has changed the paradigms of teac-hing methods. Classroom teac-hing needs to be supported with hands on laboratory exer-cises even in the commercial training systems. Many of the learning courses launched to date provide a good alternative to classroom teaching with the support of web enabled mul-timedia lessons. However, for courses like electronics, multi-media presentation is not enough and the feel of actually working on a real system, obse-rving the positive and negative results of various actions is necessary. In view of such a need for a hands-on-feel, many a times online courses need to be added with a laboratory component.
Keeping this in mind, Univer-sity of Pune is all set to open up the country’s first cyber lab for students. The laboratory is expected to meet the require-ment for conducting online experiments from the comfort of one’s home. The lab offers a simulated environment for students to conduct their experiments.
In the past, students had to be in the laboratory to gain practical experience, explained Prof Damayanti Gharpure, who is in charge of this ambitious project at the University. Accor-ding to her, while practical experience is a very important part of engineering education, it is resource intensive. Design-ing and conducting experime-nts can take time, money and energy.
Sharing experiments locally and remotely allows unique laboratory experiment to be utilized more fully, brings down the experiment cost per student, and more students available to students. This is exactly what the University’s cyber lab intends to do.
“Our goal with the remote laboratory paradigm is to make the equipment that we already have available to more students without taking away the expe-rience of being physically present in the laboratory. Internet provides the commu-nication infrastructure between students and the experiments. We are developing a remote laboratory paradigm and imp-lementing it as a network application. The system is composed of several compo-nents, supported in the user interface and the hardware,” she explained.
The objective of the project includes exploring the range of WWW technology available for preparing the course material, experimenting with the use of features offered by Netscape, CGI scripts and Java in impart-ing knowledge, preparing course material and using the material for various student groups and updating it based on student’s feedback.
The project has been runn-ing on a pilot basis at the electronics department of the university for the past one-year. Thanks to the cyber lab, the department succeeded in reviewing on-line courses and remote experimentation using web technology. The cyber lab also enabled the study of Java, Java applets, Graphics and CGI scripts. The department has developed HTML
based intera-ctive tutorials on basic digital Electronic incorporating Java Applets, Prof Gharpure infor-med, adding that even virtual instruments such as voltmeter, signal generator, CRO and power supply had been desig-ned for the cyber lab.