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Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani.

Connecting Campuses for World Class Education......

Birla Institute of Technology and science (BITS) Pilani a premier engineering and technology institution in India has four geographically distributed campuses in Pilani, Goa, Hyderabad and Dubai. Their mission is to be amongst the top 3 Technology & science institution in India by 2015 and amongst the top 25 Technology & science institutions in Asia by 2020.

In order to realise their mission, BITS recognised the need to connect all the four campuses for pedagogic as well as administrative reasons. With a number of collaborative programs being conducted on all campuses like Embryo lectures, TEDx Pilani and CEL, there was an increasing need for alumni and researchers from around the world to easily connect with students and faculty on the campuses.

BITS Connect 2.0 was envisioned as a multi-million dollar project that would provide state-of-the-art telepresense and inter-connectivity to all four campuses of BITS Pilani. It was to enable remote learning, participatory coursework, collaborative research and remote recruitment. BITSConnect 2.0 was to be a giant step for BITS Pilani in the direction of becoming a world class university.

PROJECT FOCUS About Telepresense Solution:

The Cisco Telepresense systems installed bring the power of technology and deliver the highest quality video, voice and data for a real life like experience. The system enables eye to eye contact between participants across locations. The 3 large HD display screens, integrated camera, lights, microphone and speakers give the feeling that all the participants are in the same room. An additional display helps in viewing rich media content shared from the remote location.

About class room solution:

The 250 seat class rooms are provided with a 120 inch screen and a high definition projector for presentations. The interactive podium helps the professor to annotate over the presentations and provide a simple user friendly touch interface to control all the equipment in the class room. The class rooms are also equipped with a high end audio system for speech reinforcement.

The class room can connect to similar class rooms in other campuses for distance learning through High definition video conferencing systems. The microphones provided at the students desk with a ‘look at me’

PROJECT FOCUS

feature enables the camera to zoom into any student asking a question. The large HD displays installed in the class rooms display the images from the other locations. A document camera helps in projecting objects, documents etc. to the near and far site. The lighting in the class room can be adjusted for various scenarios like local presentation and distance learning session by the touch of a button. Apart from this a PC based Video Conferencing software client enables any one to join the video sessions from their computer.

Through this facility BITS can share teaching resources across their campuses. Professors from across the world can now teach students at the three campuses in India.

Benefits: Remote Teaching: A specialized elective could now be offered to students in all 4 campuses by the professor residing in Pilani campus. Remote Meetings: Faculty and administrative staff will increase productivity by meeting via telepresense, which gives an experience of physically being present in the same conference room. Web Conferencing: Any faculty could conduct a web conference (audio + video + content sharing) with anybody in the world. Communication: An alumnus or an expert can simultaneously and remotely interact with all 4 campuses, online publication of course content. All courses can be recorded and streamed over web for benefits of distance learning students. About Godrej AV Solutions: Godrej AV Solutions is leading the leading provider of audio/visual solutions in India. Godrej AV Solutions brings to you audio/visual products and solutions that seamlessly integrate audio, video, display, lighting equipment and system controls for applications such as board rooms, video conference room, auditoriums, training rooms, Telepresense rooms, information display systems, network operating centres, experience centres, home av solutions and much more. Our partnership with companies of repute enables us to offer state of the art products and solutions. Our nationwide presence with a team of certified and experienced professionals assures our customers ‘peace of mind’ and return on investment over many years. www.godrejavsolutions.com