VTU's portal offers online help to students

With more than 1,000 scholars undertaking research in VTU, www.resource.vtu.ac.in provides complete details about research centres, guides and doctoral work being carried out at the university.

VTU e-Learning special officer Dr T N Nagabhushan said every registered guide at the university can take upto five students for post doctoral work. Also, students can now access information about professors working on varied research areas, which was quite inaccessible earlier.

Describing the importance of the research portal, he observed that online research portal now gives research scholars information about professors and their area of technological development and telephone numbers and e-mail IDs.

With more than 100 research centres in colleges under VTU, the portal provides information on workshops being held in different colleges and facilitates researchers in their projects.

The portal too provides the list of degrees conferred in the past three years by VTU.
Source code of critical areas which are common to all engineering branches, such as bio-inspired computing is also available on the portal. Dr Nagabhushan said scholars will be given two-day training on research methodologies, to equip them to conduct better research. Another important aspect of the portal is that it provides details on external funds available to VTU scholars along with research grants provided by the university.

Rs 5 crore every year

He said that VTU spends around Rs 5 crore for research every year and nearly 70-80 proposals are accepted every year. Another highlight of the portal is the creation of a discussion forum to encourage community collaboration in projects, in addition to information about regular circular notifications.

The portal was developed in a year’s time, he added. The research portal which was inaugurated by Prof Rajaraman, retd Professor of Indian Institute of Science , has already received around 19,000 hits in the past six months.