Smart classrooms, virtual classes in Karnataka

BENGALURU: Karnataka government will soon set up smart class rooms and virtual classes at its first-grade colleges to achieve quality enrichment of teaching-learning processes through technological intervention, a minister said.

"A plan is afoot to establish smart class rooms in all the government first-grade colleges across the state," Higher Education Minister R V Deshpande told reporters here today.

As a pilot project, smart class rooms are being set up in select 50 government first-grade colleges. Smart classrooms will be set up in other government colleges in a phased manner, he said.

Pointing out that virtual classes were the second mode, Deshpande said e-content in the form of video lectures, eBooks, audio books and lecture notes, pertaining to the undergraduate course syllabus, extra-curricular programmes and personality development available online as OpenCourseWare are being downloaded.

He said the downloaded E-content will be distributed to all the government first-grade colleges and will be made available to students and staff to access through networked computers and mobile handsets via wireless LAN.

"This measure is intended to supplement the traditional course delivery system by enabling the students to access useful online OpenCourseWare content offline and bypass the bottleneck of text book production," Deshpande said. Wireless local area network that helps in accessing the stored e-content is being set up in a hundred government first-grade colleges across the state.