Dronacharya College of Engineering, Gurgaon, the Nodal Center of Virtual Labs of IIT Delhi conducted one day workshop on “Virtual Labs” on 4th November 2015. A total of 60 students of Electronics, Electrical, Computer, IT and ME streams participated in the workshop. Virtual Labs is an initiative of Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Govt of India (GOI) under the National mission on Education through ICT (NMEICT). The aim of virtual labs is to conduct joint experiments by two participating institutions and also sharing costly resources. With the development of internet and computer technologies students and researchers have huge advantages in enhancing their skills and knowledge. Internet-based experimentation further permits use of resources - knowledge, software, and data available on the web, apart from encouraging skillful experiments being simultaneously performed at points separated by distance and time. Principal Prof. (Dr.) B. M. K. Prasad along with Academic administrator Dr. Jitender Kumar inaugurated the workshop and welcomed the experts to the event. Mrs. Dimple Saproo, Virtual Lab Nodal Coordinator introduced the concept of Virtual Labs, its features and usefulness. She explained the basic role and importance of the virtual labs to the students. The roles of virtual labs are as following:

1. To provide remote - access to Labs in various disciplines of Science and Engineering. These Virtual Labs cater to students of undergraduate, post graduate level and to research scholars.

2. To motivate students to conduct experiments. This helps them in learning basic and advanced concepts through remote experimentation.

3. To provide a complete Learning Management System around the Virtual Labs where the students can avail the various tools for learning, including additional web-resources, video-lectures, animated demonstrations and self-evaluation.

4. To share costly equipment and resources, which are otherwise available to limited number of users.

Mr. Tanmay Das, Outreach In-charge Virtual Labs Project IIT Delhi briefed that the basic purpose of Vlab is to provide more effective and realistic by providing additional inputs to the students like accompanying audio and video streaming of an actual lab experiment and equipment. He also conducted the real time session on Virtual Labs. He highlighted that students can avail the facilities of the following Vlabs which are ready for use. These are:

1. Computer Science & Engineering

2. Electrical Engineering

3. Mechanical Engineering

4. Chemical Engineering

5. Biotechnology and Biomedical Engineering

6. Civil Engineering

7. Physical Sciences

8. Chemical Sciences

Mr. Sanjeev Soni, Field Engineer, IIT - Delhi conducted an interactive session on Virtual labs. He demonstrated a few experiments based on Applied Physics, Basic Electronics and Data Structure labs to the students. The objective of the demonstration was to make students well conversant with the principles and functions of Virtual Labs. Hands On Practice in Labs. Later in the session 2 groups of students were allowed to do hands-on practice on Digital Logic Design and Data Structure Labs in the computer labs. Students successfully performed minimum two experiments on their own under the guidance of the faculty coordinators and IIT experts.

The workshop ended successfully with vote of thanks followed by distribution of certificates to the participants.

Overall, the workshop was a good exposure to get the basic knowledge and applying the same to various domains of engineering. It was a learning experience for undergraduate level students to perform experiments and clear the concepts of Virtual labs and utilizing the Vlab portal.