The Hindu Business Line : Move afoot for virtual learning centre in Kerala

THE Synergy Concept and Vision-2020 document prepared by the Kerala Education Grid Project and the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management - Kerala (IIITM-K) has proposed the setting up a School of Advanced Information Systems (SAIS) as a prelude to building the country's first Virtual Learning Campus (VLC) in Kerala.

Authored by Dr K.R. Srivathsan, Director, IIITM-K, the document envisions SAIS as being dedicated to interdisciplinary postgraduate study and research in basic and applied information systems, sciences, technology and management and a mission-mode R&D for building the VLC. SAIS would also act as mission coordination centre for the larger VLC Mission.

The whole initiative is aimed at enhancing the quality of higher education and research and ensuring support for knowledge intensive products and services proposed under the Vision-2020 document. Specifically, it is intended as a major step to achieve the transformation of India to a knowledge society.

SAIS is being proposed as a networked institute of institutions dedicated to coordinate and launch the VLC specifically in Kerala.

The State Government and the SAIS would later take up with the Centre the issue of enlarging the scope to drive the larger national level VLC-India Mission. According to Dr Srivathsan, Kerala will lead the initiatives of VLC-India by building the first VLC in the State.

The Kerala Education Grid, KISSAN-Kerala and the projects wing of the IIITM-K would be brought together to form the first VLC. The Grid and KISSAN-Kerala would be converted from the present pilot status to mission-mode projects to cover the entire State with a target of bringing together at least 100 institutions in the State from diverse fields including a mix of higher education, research labs, health, agriculture and management.

Explaining the context of the new initiative, the vision document said coming years would see explosive growth in uses and applications of advanced information systems, knowledge organisation and management in every organisation.

The emerging broadband and satellite network services would make them widely accessible over the Web, thereby spawning virtual enterprises, virtual universities and learning campuses and such other collaborative programmes and organisations in diverse fields and domains.

What it takes to set up a VLC

THE following steps are involved in building a Virtual Learning Campus (VLC):

Connecting institutions of higher education, research, colleges and universities in all fields in a given geographic region over a terrestrial broadband network.

Setting up a gateway centre for each VLC that will be the root mode for the terrestrial network and which hosts an Edusat ground station.

The gateway centres will be autonomous postgraduate research and `server' institutions attached to a premier host institution for managing the VLC. It will have content development facilities, data centres and portals hosting different institutions and supporting knowledge intensive products and services (KIPS) for the region and outside. Gateway centres will support research scholars, teacher training and servicing of e-learning, digital libraries and e-publications services for all the member institutions in the VLC.

VLC-India itself will be built by networking all the gateway centres in the country over a nationwide terrestrial broadband network. Edusat (and future thematic satellites) network will be available by default as each of them will have associated earth stations.

The proposed approach will integrate several of the ongoing and proposed network initiatives in the country. The School of Advanced Information Systems (SAIS) will be established as the central coordinating institution of all gateway centres that drive and service the VLC-India Mission.