Certified online Interactive Degree Courses, 3D Virtual Labs and Escalating Research Projects in India - Vision 2040

Abstract

As India is rich in talent, lagging in research and poor in finance, authors sincerely appeal UGC, NAAC, NPTEL, IIT, AICTE, IISER, IISc and administrative institutions like IIM, UPSC and Supreme Court core committees to take initiative in implementing and maintaining industrial and research oriented certified online audio-visual interactive degree courses across the Indian boundaries. Benefits and implications of this scheme are: 1) Distance education system, Open education system and Open book exam etc can be eliminated. 2) High quality research orientation can be inculcated among teaching staff. 3) Experimental approach and industrial orientation- both can be implemented and maintained simultaneously. 4) Educational stress on teenage students and financial burdens on parents - both can be eliminated. 5) Reservation issues pertaining to caste and seat allocation can be eliminated. 6) Degree level scholarship schemes can be eliminated. 7) All educational institutions can be encouraged to tie up with online degree system with unique pattern and quality and can be forced to focus on laboratory activities rather than teaching. 8) Current educational staff can be classified into five broad categories as Education wing, Call center wing, Research wing, Oration wing and Industrial wing. 9) Students lagging in grasping the key technical points can listen & watch the recorded and edited information several times for a better understanding and thus doubts, subject fear, back logs and detaining issues can be avoided to a great extent. 10) By maintaining educational call centers, interaction with students can be established and online degree courses can be strengthened further. 11) With recorded and edited lab experiments and 3D modeling tools, virtual laboratories can be developed and thus awareness can be inculcated in students on knowledge acquisition on various experiments and experimental setups. 12) As there is no restriction on available number of (electronic) seats, stress oriented and suicide provoking complicated entrance exams can be relinquished. 13) Poor students, Female students, male and female job holders, physically handicapped students and students not interested to attend colleges can get better education in this scheme. 14) For maintaining this online degree system across India, there seems a big scope for new employment. 15) By 2040, India can have a leading role in world science, engineering and technology. Even though the proposal under consideration is interlinked with many political and social issues, with reference to ‘Vision2040’ program, this proposal can be given a chance in Indian higher education system.