Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur has taken the first step to establish itself as a pioneer of e-learning in the distance education mode.
At a ceremony, cum, demonstration, the IIT tech brass showed how it works and established links with Indore, Delhi etc.
Unlike IIT-Bombay which attempts to do the same through satellite and IGNOU which does it through television, IIT-K has launched it in multicast mode which enables the programme packet sent to be duplicated particularly when it is being sent from one place to another.
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The unicast mode enables packets to be prepared at one centre and then transmitted to the other, with the latter transferring it to the third one. Each of the centre keeps one packet for itself and transfers the rest to the next.
Unicast method is ponderous and it can take the programme packet only to one destination at a time, while in multicast , information from one computer can be transmitted to a number of remotely located computers various destinations can be covered in one transmission.
Besides it is less expensive and can be transmitted in lower bandwidth as well. It is known as M-Bone, Multi cast backbone.
The system is bi directional, i.e students can ask questions from the teacher and the reply can come in immediately.
The mode has been developed over the last two years by a core team comprising Professors PK Kalra, Krishna Kumar, YN Singh, Neeru Chaabra, among others. It took nearly 18 months to develop it.
The software used is not proprietory software but is open source software which is being further developed by the IIT team.
The software has been named Brihaspati. A few softwares has been brought from outside, the rest is being developed by the IIT team.
Krishna Kumar.professor at IIT K said that the plan was thought of 10 years backby the HRD ministry but at that time this did not evolve for distant education.
Thereafter IIT's and IIM's got together to evolve the distance education mode. This required special classrooms, which had sound acoustics, airconditioning, lighting etc. The works department of IIT Kanpur undertook the project and completed it in 16 months.