Virtual Labs, a Ministry of Education project under NMEICT, offers free remote laboratory learning experiences. Workshops and nodal centers support institute partnerships within the Virtual Labs consortium. The project, led by IIT Delhi and involving twelve institutes, provides over 100 Virtual Labs and 700+ web-enabled experiments across various domains using open-source technologies. These simulations are accessible online without any additional infrastructure or fees. As a platform, Virtual Labs offers a collection of interactive experiments designed for engineering students in Indian universities and institutions. These experiments are currently presented as websites with interactive content aimed at enhancing learning outcomes. The structure of each experiment follows principles of pedagogy, ensuring that the content effectively supports learning objectives.
The Virtual Labs currently only reports usage data from Jan-2020 onwards. In the 5 years, 17 Million users have come to the Virtual Labs platform and have visited more than 120 Million pages.
Following is the list of the primary stakeholders of Virtual Labs:
- Students and Learners: Use the experiments with the objective of learning a topic interactively.
- Teachers and Educators: Use the experiments as part of their courses.
- Experiment Developers: Develop experiments, which involves finding a gap area, proposing and getting approval for an experiment and developing the content for the experiment
- Subject Matter Experts(SME): Provide subject-matter expertise to the experiment developers
- Outreach Team: Promote the use of Virtual Labs in all the institutes in a specific geographical region
- Nodal Centers: Promote the use of Virtual Labs in their respective institutes
- VLEAD Team: Develops and operates all technology related aspects of the Virtual Labs platform including infrastructure, operations, tools development etc.