IIT Bombay celebrates Digital India Week by showcasing unique projects

As a part of the 'Digital India Week' undertaken by the Government of India, IIT Bombay today showcased projects to empower the nation through Education Technology. The inauguration of the event was done by Prof. Prasanna Mujumdar, Dean R&D, IIT Bombay, Prof. Deepak B. Phatak, faculty and Principal Investigator T10KT Project, IIT Bombay, and Prof. Kannan Moudgalya, faculty and Principal Investigator Spoken Tutorials, IIT Bombay.

Speaking on the occasion, Prof  Mujumdar said, “Education and R&D go hand in hand. Our motto at IIT Bombay is to develop technology that will be beneficial for the society at large. Through this initiative, we wish to inform people about the various projects that we have undertaken over the years and how they can benefit them for a better life and future.”

Digital India week at IIT Bombay will showcase projects that aim at transforming India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy. It comprises various initiatives under the each targeted to prepare India for becoming a knowledge economy through synchronized and co-ordinated engagement.

Speaking on the relevance of Digital India, Prof  Moudgalya said, “India is an aspiring country. We desire to become a developed nation. But following the route of the western countries through the conventional approach of building physical infrastructure will be extremely time consuming and prohibitively expensive.  The brick and mortar approach can easily be replaced by ICT based techniques that will help us leapfrog and catch up with the developed world quickly.”

Technology therefore has become one of the most important and sought out thing in the recent years. The initiative of Digital India Week therefore aims to bridge the digital divide. Speaking about the need to bridge the gap, Prof. Deepak B. Phatak said, “It is our commitment to the nation to provide each and everyone an access to the information available on the open source. The fact that most of the information available on the open source is in English creates this digital divide. Therefore we are trying to offer blended courses in different Indian languages so that people who are eager to learn are not devoid of this opportunity.”

Projects on display at IIT Bombay

T10KT 

The 'Train 10,000 Teachers' (T10KT) Project conducts ISTE workshops in core subjects, for faculty of engineering and science. These are conducted in distance mode through live transmission and audio-video interaction, using the A-VIEW platform. Expert faculty from IITs deliver the course. A rigorous approach is used, with emphasis on problem solving, tutorials, assignments, and laboratory exercises.

These workshops are also conducted in blended MOOC format, with synchronous and asynchronous activity spread over six weeks, to make the learning more effective. The recorded lecture contents are released in open source, free for download and classroom teaching. The project is in its second phase, in partnership with IIT Kharagpur, and has reached out to 1 Lakh teachers since 2012 through 352 Remote Centres across the country.

To know more, please visit http://www.it.iitb.ac.in/nmeict/home.html

e-kalpa

The e-kalpa,' is sponsored by the Ministry of Human Resources and Development, Government of India as part of the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology. Key Objectives of e-kalpa is to create digital online content for learning Design with distance e-Learning courses. This initiative has been collaboratively developed by the three institutions IDC at IIT Bombay, NID at Bangalore and DOD at IIT Guwahati along with the support of other design related institutions and organizations across India.

To know more, please visit  http://dsource.in.

e-Yantra

The e-Yantra enthuses students through a National e-Yantra Robotics Competition(eYRC). It also builds an eco-system by setting up infrastructure and training teachers in colleges through the e-Yantra Lab Setup Initiative (eLSI). Having been enthusiastically received by states around the country with its 107 labs established in 2014, it targets a total of 500 labs as centres of Innovation to encourage interdisciplinary skills and hands on training in the next 2 years.

To know more, visit: http://e-yantra.org

FOSSEE

Free and Open Source Software for Education or FOSSEE (www.fossee.in) Project at IIT Bombay is geared to promote the use of open source software in education and by extension, in the corporate world. The activities of FOSSEE revolve around creating educational content around open source software and encouraging the  introduction of courses on open source in syllabi of universities, apart from promoting it through publicity initiative.  It is now the policy of the Government of India to prefer Open Source Software over Closed Source Software.

To know more, please visit http://fossee.in

Spoken Tutorial

Spoken Tutorial teaches various software through audio video tutorials in a short time. The Spoken Tutorial project is promoting IT literacy in all types of academic institutions: engineering institutions, arts, science and commerce colleges, diploma colleges, ITIs and schools, with the focus to provide employment opportunities to all. Through dubbing into all of our official 22 languages, we bridge digital divide as well. Until now, we have trained about 8 lakh students using the Spoken Tutorial methodology. To know more, please visit http://spoken-tutorial.org

Virtual Labs

The ‘Virtual Labs’ project addresses these issues by making remote experimentation possible through simulations and remote triggered labs. In collaboration with several premier engineering institutes, over 100 lab courses, consisting of over 1000 experiments, have been developed and made available via a single portal,www.vlab.co.in.

The ultimate aim is to provide a complete learning management system around these labs.

To know more, please visit http://vlab.co.in

Ask a Question
The 'Ask A Question' is a unique free and open interactive forum through which learners can clarify their conceptual doubts in the field of science and engineering.  Faculty members form IIT Bombay respond to their doubts posted on forum as well as asked during the live session. Presently, one hour sessions are conducted in the field of Electrical engineering and Physics on Thursday and Friday respectively.

To know more, please visit http://ask.co-learn.in

Researchoscope

The “Researchoscope” consists of video archives of presentations of doctoral students of IIT Bombay on their research work. An offline interactive forum provides viewers  an opportunity to clarify their doubts for continuing a discussion about the presentation.”

To know more, please visit http://www.co-learn.in

Courses on View

The “Courses On View is a portal that provides free and open access to  the Engineering and Science courses recorded live in the classrooms of IIT Bombay. It also includes course overview, syllabus, prerequisites, references, assignments with solutions  and slides for the respective courses. These are available through video on demand and are excellent resources to further critical thinking and intellectual exploration.
The Digital Week at IIT Bombay will also witness workshops being conducted by teams from Spoken Tutorials, FOSEE and e-Kalpa over the week. This event promises to showcase the various initiative undertaken by IIT Bombay in the field of ICT.  Most of these projects are funded by the National Mission on Education through ICT, MHRD, Govt. of India. In addition to the events at IIT Bombay, more than 100 academic institutions across India that are project partners of IIT Bombay also plan to celebrate the Digital India Week.

For details, please visit http://fossee.in/digital-india/