BigGyan to present webinar on eLearning and Making Education Sexy

BigGyan CEO Diipak Gupta will present a webinar entitled, "eLearning and Making Education Sexy" for Education institutes and Corporate trainers on May 10, 2010.

May 4, 2010:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

(Press Release) – Delhi, India (May 5, 2010) – BigGyan (www.biggyan.com) announced today that Diipak Gupta, the company’s CEO, will present a webinar entitled, “eLearning and Making Education Sexy”, for the Education institutes and Corporate trainers.

Education and learning are often equated to rigorous activities like military training. Education institutes and corporate trainers behave accordingly and create very strict, disciplined environments during their classes. Accordingly, students don’t enjoy studies and often resort to rote learning to get grades in examination. This webinar will discuss methods to sex up the classroom environment in order to improve the overall effectiveness of the lecture.

“Communication techniques are changing rapidly. Education sector has not responded to it with the urgency that is required. Most students spend lot of time online and teachers seem to be lagging behind,” said Gupta. “We help institutes and trainers with easy to use tools so that they can transition to online world seamlessly. This allows them to gain students confidence and respect. It increases their brand identity as well which is a must for corporate trainers.”

The presentation will also cover how eLearning platforms are changing the rules of the game. Through online Course Creation (identifying, preparing and organizing content) teachers can intuitively move online. The webinar will provide attendees with actionable best practices for online learning management such as course creation, social learning and continuous student assessment.

About BigGyan

BigGyan, product from iSilkRoute Software Technologies is the first cloud eLearning platform in the world. BigGyan enables education institutes and enterprises to provide eLearning to their students and employees.

Some of the features of this platform include multimedia course content, forums, video conference, mobile learning, online Gradebook, attendance, parent portal.

What sets BigGyan apart from other eLearning providers is that it is a complete eLearning solution. It has revolutionized eLearning by making eLearning as easy as eMail. Finally, eLearning can realize its true potential as John Chambers, CEO, Cisco Systems - "The next big killer application on the internet is going to be education. Education over the internet is going to be so big it is going to make e-mail usage look like a rounding error."

As per the brand promise "Rebooting education", BigGyan aims to significantly change the way education is delivered.

Visualizing molecules – Unlocking the mystery

A new feature Release - BigGyan releases a new feature on its eLearning platform. Now chemistry/biology teachers can show molecules in 3-d at click of a button. This is going to revolutionize the teaching of chemistry forever.

April 16, 2010:

Chemistry is a fascinating subject. It explains lot of things in our lives. Why do we hear a hissing sound when we open a coke bottle? How does a soap clean things? How and why you get headaches?  P. W. Atkins said "...one or two atoms can convert a fuel to a poison, change a color, render an inedible substance edible, or replace a pungent odor with a fragrant one. That changing a single atom can have such consequences is the wonder of the chemical world." I remember my chemistry teacher in school claimed that the word "chemistry" came from a hinglish phrase "Kya hai mystery" (What is the mystery)?

One reason why chemistry has this mysterious character is that it is difficult to visualize things. Hence, books and consequently teachers rely on molecular formulas or 2-d structural formulas to teach chemistry. With BigGyan you can change that. You can include "interactive" 3-d structures of the chemicals in your online course curriculum. The students can play with  the 3-d structures (rotate them, flip them, move them with mouse) allowing them to get more familiar with these structures. See an example here.

Have a look at some examples here.

a. Caffeine

b. Aspirin

c. Animation - Cyclohexane chair

d. Alpha Helix

e. Water and ethanol

f. Nano Technology

g. Phenylnitrene vibration

BigGyan supports a wide range of molecular file formats, including Protein Data Bank (pdb), Crystallographic Information File (cif), MDL Molfile (mol), and Chemical Markup Language (CML).

Various websites on internet provide files (in one of the above listed file formats) for huge number of molecules. You may search on Google for molecules you may need. For example, if you want to show 3-d structure of carbon dioxide in your course, a quick way to find the corresponding file is using following query on Google “filetype:mol carbon dioxide”. Similarly, you may search for file formats other than mol.

Some of the websites that provide these molecule file formats are listed below for your reference:

1. http://cccbdb.nist.gov/mdlmol1.asp

2. http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/download/download.do

3. http://molvis.sdsc.edu/fgij/

Apple iPAD and eLearning

As part of its weekly poem releases, BigGyan releases a poem “I am going to buy an iPad” by Diipak Gupta.

April 1, 2010:

Apple recently launched its tablet PC the iPad. Tablet PC is a PC in a different form factor that lies somewhere between a Laptop and a Smart Phone. You can carry it much easily than a laptop but it does not fit your pocket. As of now, it does not seem to be requirement of masses simply because people are comfortable using their laptops for general stuff and using mobile phones for calling and messaging.

However, it has potential to fulfill needs in some niche markets. It can be great tool for graphic designing, an artist can just draw on iPad using digital pen as one would draw on a sheet of paper using normal ink pen. But that market would still be limited. A bigger market could be the education sector. Teachers can use it to teach students remotely using live web-meetings (Ex. BigGyan Web-meeting). The main advantage is that it is comfortable to write using a digital pen on a tablet PC than writing using mouse/scratchpad on a laptop. Students do lot of writing work. Tablet PC could be useful to them also. They could use it to take notes and prepare assignment, may be even write exams. I am waiting for Apple to launch a low cost tablet PC for students and teachers; they probably can call it iStu. As of now, I am going to buy an iPad. Hope it meets my expectations.

Poem - I am going to buy an iPad

By Diipak Gupta

I am going to buy an iPad,

Hope, it is not just a passing fad.

They say it is a tablet PC,

Looks like a big iPhone to me, you got to see,

Why you need it, I am not sure,

But I am going to try it once, for its pure lure.

It has got the Apple touch, it has got all the sex,

I am going to see if it can make me flex.

It is an incredible experience says Steve Jobs,

The guy knows how to wow the mobs.

It looks as sexy as Kareena Kapoor,

As it has been launched with such grandeur.

So, it has big feature set, it also has the zing,

The good thing is that there is always one more thing.