BITS Pilani campuses collaborate to allow knowledge transfer in real-time

New Delhi: Birla Institute of Technology & Sciences (BITS) Pilani has four campuses – at Pilani, Goa, Hyderabad and Dubai. To make administration and pedagogy better across all the campuses, it has implemented a comprehensive Cisco collaboration solution that offers facilities of high-definition video conferencing and immersive tele-presence.

Such collaboration solutions help BITS Pilani to facilitate efficient knowledge transfer between industry and academia as well as enable interaction of students, teachers and alumni across all campuses in real time.

The move will benefit more than 11,000 students and 700 teachers along with thousands of alumni across the globe. Since web-conferencing with outsiders is also possible, BITSians have access to global leaders, business giants and guest lecturers.

Moreover, now BITS Pilani can also offer multi-campus classroom teaching. Alumni or industry experts may also deliver lectures via PPTs, audio or video recordings. Lecturers may also interact with students and staff members across all campuses at once. On an average, eight classes are conducted every day in which 20 to 60 students from all the three campuses participate.

Faculty and staff across three campuses in India can also multi-party voice conferencing. On an average, about 10 meetings are conducted every day out of which 3 to 5 meetings have more than 100 users at a time.

Collaboration solutions include BITS Connect 2.0 where alumni who are entrepreneurs or venture capitalists mentor budding entrepreneurs from the institute. Teachers under the ‘Work Integrated Learning Program’ run by BITS Pilani can use WebEx while students from one campus can appear for placement interviews going on at any other campus. Recruiters too benefit as they have access to a larger talent pool to choose from.

Last but not the least, collaboration of BITS Pilani campuses now allows more than 14 specialized electives to be offered to all students across campuses.

This post was written by Aditya Singhal, co-founder of askIITians.