Enhancing Virtual Labs Usage in Colleges Virtual Labs is an MHRD (Ministry of Human Resource Development, India) initiative in which over 1100 virtual experiments are freely available to engineering students across India and the rest of the globe to access and learn. Until the beginning of 2018, the lab usages by students were mostly in the push mode during the workshops. The average usage per workshop was significantly low, at about 8 usages per student. Interventions were proposed in the process to improve the usage by enhancing u0027Arousalu0027 and u0027Choicesu0027 as studentsu0027 motivation. Qualitative observation of the results shows that students conducted more than the requested 15 experiments, along with the expectation of instant appreciation and recognition. This change in the process to create extrinsic motivation increased the usage per student from 8.62 to 19.7. selfreported motivation levels of students after doing the experiments improved from 5 to 8, 10 being the highest on the scale. There was a reduced variability represented by the coefficient of variation changing from 51.9% to 21.39%.

Blended Learning Approach using Virtual Laboratory Applications in Engineering Chemistry Traditional classroom teaching practices often lacks the active engagement of students in the class. Performing experiment in the laboratory is one of the most effective methods for getting deep knowledge in chemistry. But sometimes listening theory lectures and performing related experiments in the laboratory does not helps the students to understand the concepts clearly, as this lacks repeatability and visualization of concepts. Induction of virtual laboratory in combination with theory lectures and physical laboratory could solve this problem. Virtual laboratory have multifaceted advantages such as repetitive performance, easy to handle simulations and remote triggered experimentations. Such remote triggered laboratories found to enhance studentsu0027 academic performance as it enables them to perform anytimeanywhere. In this paper, we report our observations regarding the use of virtual laboratory experiments in chemistry subject and their role in enhancing First Year B. Tech. engineering studentsu0027 performance when induced as a blended classroom. UVVisible spectrophotometry experiment was performed to verify the usefulness of virtual laboratory from studentu0027s knowledge perspective. The effect of a blended learning approach was carefully studied and evaluated in comparison with traditional classroom teaching and virtual laboratory. Our study reveals the enhancement of studentu0027s performance in a blended learning environment compared to just physical performance in the laboratory and performing individually with the virtual laboratory.