Comparative study of laboratory education in disparate institutes of India

Laboratory education is very important and plays a vital role in science and engineering courses. The cost needed for the setting up of a good laboratory can be huge and expensive to institutes that are heavily resource constrained. The rapid development of information and communication technologies, on the other hand, has had a remarkable change in the education system. This paper provides a comprehensive insight into the present status of laboratory education system in India and change with the impact of technology interventions such as virtual labs. In this paper, three types of institutes were compared on their general laboratory curricula coverage, learning methodologies adopted, laboratory facilities and finally the learning outcomes from their students Results indicate Virtual Laboratories fill the huge gap in the learning outcomes in an efficient, yet interactive and cost effective way irrespective of the constrained resources seen at many institutes.