Wah! I feel, Dr. R.S.D. Wahida Banu, our respected principal has taken the level of GCE Chronicles one step up in the college. Really proud about her. You will know the reason for this feeling when you read the incident which I'm going to narrate. But, before we go, I would like to sprinkle few supporting facts about the incident :
GCE has its Digital Library - Conference hall, with excellent Video Conferencing facility. Last year, our college has been selected as one of the 33 remote centers in India for offering virtual classroom whenever IIT Bombay conducts a workshop in collaboration with ISTE.
Till yesterday, the above fact seemed like just a piece of news that was published in the recent edition of our newsletter even for the chronies. But, this day gave me a wonderful adventure to know about the video conferences that take place in the campus, in detail.
Today being the first day of the two week workshop on "Research methodologies" sponsored by the MHRD held at IIT Bombay, Hon'ble Minister of Human Resource Development - Kapil Sibal inaugurated the workshop through a video link from New Delhi. When it was about to be 10 AM, I got a call from Chitra ma'm saying that the Principal wants a Student Editor from the college newsletter to cover the event. Though the eligible candidates for attending the workshop was PG or Ph.D scholars, I happened to be a part of today's event. I would say, this is the first time in the past three years that a chrony is getting an official invitation to cover an event. If this trend continues, I strongly believe that the GCE Chronicles is going to render many worthy services as the official press of the college, in the forthcoming years. Thank you principal madam, for this opportunity.
I would love to share how the video conferencing works rather than what was the workshop about, which is however going to take place in the next annual edition of GCE Chronicles. IIT Bombay has provided an exclusive Client application for video conferencing for the remote centers. With the high speed internet connection in the digital library, the infrastructure for such a video conferencing is highly possible. The video captured in IIT Bombay venue is called as "Teacher Video" and all the other videos from the remote centers are called as "Student Video". The application used for this also has visual-aid accessories such as "Document" for displaying PPTs, "Whiteboard" for live teaching and other tools such as "Chat" which could be used to send text chats to the moderators at the IIT for getting the doubts clarified. It is also possible for the students in any of the remote centers to interact with the teacher during the "queries session". The teacher could select an institution randomly or specifically. Also, the student could make a request to the teacher to attend his question so that the "student video" is connected to that particular remote center.
This was not an easy job at all, when I gathered information about it in depth. Few staff from the Mechanical CADD department were given the training by IIT Bombay to be the network operators and the video coordinators. Dr. Balusamy from Mechanical Engineering Department and Prof. Govindaraju from Electrical Department are the coordinators of these video conferences that take place in the campus. Principal, being proud of them, appreciated that they are the perfectionists in this.
(For news about this video conference : http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-industry/services/education/kapil-sibal-inaugurates-iit-bombay-workshop-to-train-10000-teachers/articleshow/14390438.cms )
-- Navaneetha Krishnan. M --
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