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Virtual institute for teaching IT to be set up

Premier engineering institutions in the country are planning to start a virtual institute of technology to train graduates for the information technology industry.

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The idea originated when plans were on to start and Indian Institute of Information Technology within the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur.

After initial discussions between the Uttar Pradesh government and the central government's Department of Electronics, it was referred to IIT, Kanpur, and other premier engineering institutions; the Indian Institutes of Management; the regional engineering colleges and those involved in distance education.

The representatives of the institutions had agreed on the proposal at a meeting on October 9.

The setting up of the virtual institution will give the country an opportunity to merge as a training centre for countries that are members of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, Southeast and West Asia and Africa.

A virtual institution is distance education over the Web. The system envisages teaching a large number of students through the Net, thereby creating a virtual classroom.

K R Srivathsan, who heads the electrical engineering department of IIT, Kanpur, said that personal attention to specific problems would suffer in this method of teaching. Therefore instructors should be trained at each centre. Only then could they solve problems that students would face in comprehending lectures, he said.

A hybrid satellite-based network capable of digital video broadcast over two or three channels, data broadcasting, to use idle hours between video broadcasting and VSAT, all coexistent on the same transponder, will form the backbone of the virtual institute.

- Compiled from the Indian media

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