By Zia Askari
Taking a cue from realizing the full potential of collaborative learning, the government of India has allocated Rs 100 crore for enabling ‘Virtual Classrooms’ as part of the announced Union Budget 2014-15.
The Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley announced that the government is set to put a lot of focus towards enabling virtual classrooms and encourage collaborative learning in the country’s education system.
As virtual classroom is an integral part of the UCC or the Unified Collaboration and Communication segment, this announcement should spur requirement of networking gear, video conferencing as well as end-point security solutions that would be needed to secure the virtual machines.
While a mix of virtualization and cloud technologies can play a key role in terms of delivering the content to such ecosystem, it would be interesting to see how this concept is implemented by universities and colleges.
Additionally, this should also encourage education focused systems integrators and solution providers as there would be opportunities to integrate systems and provide services around the theme of virtual classroom.
The government has also announced Rs 500 crores for setting up 5 more IIMs and IITs in the country.
