Recognized as one of the biggest technological universities in India and having 186 colleges affiliated to it, Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU) was looking out for a solution, which would help its students use on-demand lectures using content provided by National Programme for Technical Enhanced Learning (NPTEL). This requirement meant to deploy advanced state-of-the-art technology, the on-demand video streaming and community learning using the latest Web 2.0 technologies.

Client Requirements

The e-Learning Centre of VTU is now all set to provide 129 video courses on college networks with more than 6,000 hours of high-resolution lectures by professors from the country's elite Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc).

Once the client was briefed about how the entire solution would be deployed and the cost involved in this project was finalized, VTU designated Locuz Enterprise Solutions to manage the content management software, which was based on open-source platform and provided 'anytime anywhere learning environment' to students of VTU and its affiliated colleges. The service provider (SP) realized quickly the entire consumer requirement and how to address them within the timeframe of the project rollout.

The project is now implemented in 60 colleges of the state. The high-quality video e-learning material was required to be distributed to all undergraduate engineering students in the country, which was recorded by IIT and IISc professors under NPTEL. Initially, students faced problem of sharing videos as there was only nine terabytes to accommodate all courses, with storage space posing as the biggest problem.

The Solution

The entire project was valued at approximately half a million rupees and called for deployment of hardware. Sun Microsystems was assigned the job role to arrange for hardware and TISRA for the content management software.

The work started two-and-half-years ago with the assistance of IT firms such as Sun Microsystems, Locuz Enterprise Solutions and TISRA. It took one year to design the specifications required for VTU. “With the help of Sun Microsystems and e-learning platform support from TISRA, we evolved a unique advanced e-learning deployment solution called e-vidya. The e-vidya solution meets the requirements of students by providing them the NPTEL media content, VTU media content, and advanced Web 2.0 content management solution,” said Mohd Arifuddin, AVP-Sales, Locuz Enterprise Solutions.

The entire hardware architecture required state-of-art, CMT-based servers from Sun Microsystems and high-capacity, high-performance storage systems for content repository. Deployment of the solution was done over LAN and WAN in 60 colleges. After the deployment, the major task was to provide training to the faculty about the solutions. “Our existing relationship with VTU helped us bag this interesting and challenging project,” Arifuddin added.

Considered to be the brainchild of VTU, Dr TN Nagabhushan, who is now the Head of Information, Science and Engineering at Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering said, “The bandwidth limit of videos posted on Youtube, posed a major problem for college students to watch videos.” This led to the birth of video content management system, which is an indexed collection of all the videos. Now the students can search courses by the branch, engineering year they are studying in, and the professor whose lecture they want to view. With just three of four courses, the programme was first installed in MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bengaluru, along with the hardware platform support from Sun Microsystems and the content management software from TISRA.
The Sunsparc server was provided free to colleges. It was an advantage for any college with a 1GB backbone network, a 1GB switch and desktops with 1GB RAM. As the server was a high-performance streaming server, about 500 users could watch the videos concurrently.

A Satisfied Client

With more than 1,000 scholars pursuing research under VTU, this would help them access additional reading material and carry out good quality research. This also meant that people who viewed the videos could go through the courses and migrate to other specializations in engineering.

Client Speak

Satisfied with the imple­mentation of the Sun P5120 streaming server and six terabyte storage systems, VTU is now at par with the rest of the universities across the world as it is primarily focused on the necessity to have an open-source platform and the indigenous deployment of the video content. "This network will meet the computing demand of post graduate students in the campus, provide e-learning environment, access to digital library, support examination, administration work and more importantly have sufficient bandwidth for videoconferencing,from any network access point,” added Nagabhushan.

MINAKSHI SHETTY
(minakshis@cybermedia.co.in)

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