New Delhi Amrita University’s A-VIEW has earned the multi-disciplinary research 
institution a prestigious international laurel for this year, weeks after Cisco hailed the flagship e-learning platform as one of the world’s most important internet innovations.
A-VIEW (Amrita Virtual Interactive E-Learning World), which can be used free across India for online teaching, meetings and training in various sectors, bagged the South Asia Education Summit Award 2014 in Online Education Platform Provider category.
Supported by the Union Ministry of Human Resources Development, Amrita-developed A-VIEW platform is the only project — other than the Aadhar UID — from India to be selected by American MNC Cisco, the global leader in networking and internet applications, in its world-wide list of novel e-governance internet initiatives.
Earlier this week, a top Unesco official handed the award to Prof Kamal Bijlani on behalf of the 2003-founded Amrita University headquartered near Coimbatore down-country. The September 30 function at India International Centre here came after a detailed choosing process that considered several things, including innovation for inclusive education, leadership and impact on society.
Unesco Representative to India Huma Masood gave away the laurel to Prof Bijlani, who is the director of E-Learning Research Lab at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham’s Amritapuri campus off Kollam in south Kerala.
A-VIEW, which is currently being used by over 5,000 colleges, has a pool of 1 lakh teachers across the country — all of them trained by Prof Deepak Phatak of IIT Bombay. Also, a QEEE program, where Prof Ashok Jhunjhunwala of IIT Madras conducts live direct classes from the best IIT teachers, uses A-VIEW to thousands of students all over India. These programmes have clocked 60 lakh training hours, bringing tremendous ICT awareness in the country.
A-VIEW is developed by Amrita University that humanitarian icon Mata Amritanandamayi Devi founded in 2003. Supported by the National Mission on Education via Information and Communications Technology under Ministry of HRD (since 2009), A-VIEW is part of the ‘Talk to a Teacher’ program led by Prof Phatak, a Padma awardee.
Inspired by Mata Amritanandamayi Devi’s desire to use and develop technology to facilitate education and learning amongst the underprivileged, a team of professors and technologists at the Amrita University took upon themselves to develop the A-VIEW learning platform. The team consists of experienced professionals, including those who returned from abroad to India to join Amrita University.
As a proven internet-based collaborative video-conferencing platform for online training, A-VIEW is being used for large-scale online classrooms, meetings, trainings & workshops. Its software allows collaborative, synchronised sharing of many types of multimedia content, including video and audio of lectures, text, associated videos, written instructions, and slideshow presentations.
A-VIEW is currently very successful in the higher education sector; and it can be easily extended for various e-governance applications. Since A-VIEW is completely developed in India by Amrita University, it provides complete control on the content, recordings, servers, and security. This is not possible with commercial platforms like Google Hangout, Vidyo, Skype.