Most Innovative Project : Amity University : Interactive Class Rooms

Saturday, July 04, 2009

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Amity is one of India's leadingprivate educational groups with more than 60,000 students and 2500 faculty across India. Amity institutes are located at different parts of the country including Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Kolkata, etc. The need for interactive class rooms came from the basic concept of Amity, i.e, uniform education for each and every student irrespective of their location. Hence they deployed a MPLS network to connect all locations. The reason behind deploying such a network is that they needed a secure and reliable connection between all locations.

Dr. JS Sodhi Asstt. Vice President, AKC Data Systems QWhat led to the deployment of the project ? The 'uniformity in education' among all Amity locations throughout the country is the main thought behind this project. It is practically not possible by various domain experts & industry leaders to visit all our campus for delivering special lectures or sharing their thoughts with students whereas we want to give this experience to all Amity students whereever they may be studying. This project solutions has removed all physical distances and a single lecture from industry top CEO can be transmitted on Amity MPLS & thus listened by multiple Amity locations with complete two way interactivity. QWhat according to you is the USP of the project ? The USP of the project is that the desired results of transmission of Live Class Room/Event has been achieved by using mix of two existing different solutions (eLearning & Surveillance Camera) without any additional cost to the Organization.

Earlier when Amity would invite an expert lecturer orexternal speakers, then he/she was only able to address one classroom. Student in other locations could not benefir from this. They were not getting good exposure to industry experts. Amity then deployed an e-learning suite for them, which solved most their problems. But it still lacked quality and interactivity in the education process. For example, the video was delayed and not smooth, students could not see who was asking questions from the other locations, and so on. The major challenge was to implement a more interactive class room, where even students could interact among themselves can interact, without any delay in video as well as audio. They came across lots of video conferencing solutions from various vendors, but and what has been finally implemented is unique.

To meet the strategic need and to implement two way audio-video setup with minimum investment they used their exiting e-learning suite and IP cameras to build up the system. Using the existing e-learning suite they could share intellectual resources with other locations such as presentations, documents, etc. And using the existing IP cameras already deployed across Amity location, the video is transmitted over the network. Thus the video of the presenter is captured via web cam and displayed to the student at different locations and the IP camera is used to capture video of students sitting at different classrooms, and displaying it to presenter as well as other student in a single window.

There were a number of technical challenges faced during the implementation of this project. One was requirement of dedicated high bandwidth as audio, video and presentation were transferred via same channel. Second challenge was integration of the e-learning software with the IP cameras. The problem was that the IP cameras could only transmit the video, while the audio was transferred through the e-learning package. This resulted in a lag between the audio and video. It was restricted after a considerable amount of tuning. Plus they also face challenges in deploying high resolution cameras in live classrooms. Since the camera had to be fitted in a location from where the entire classroom would be visible.

After this project was implemented successfully, there was positive feedback from end users. Apart from this it also gave a lot of cost benefits to the university. There were in times and travel because the guest lectureres didn't have to travel to multiple locations. Plus they were able to record the lecturs and put them up on the intranet, so that others could benefit from it later.

The interactive classrooms project was implemented in 7 hardworking months and with minimal cost. They also have a setup of complete failover, so incase one of the servers or firewalls goes down, the backup automatically takesover. In the future they are planning to stream the lectures directly to students' mobiles so that they could view the lectures even if they are not present in the class.

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