Bloodless coup: Dissecting animals in virtual lab

Learning zoology will never be the same again, at least on the campus of Bundelkhand University, Jhansi. There will be no frog, mouse or guinea pig to dissect in the laboratories, and replacing them will be digital alternatives as students of this university are all set to start dissection on Virtual Simulated Labs (VSL).
This follows the instructions of the University Grants Commission (UGC) wherein the apex funding body has ordered ban of animal dissection in labs for undergraduate and postgraduate programs across the country.
Talking to TOI during a visit to the city, vice-chancellor of Bundelkhand University Prof Avinash C Pandey said, “We have procured the perpetual licence of the software by incurring one-time investment and now it would be run on Aakash tablet, 30 each for BSc and MSc classes, from the coming academic session.” The Finance Committee and the Academic Council of the university have already approved the project following which the university has taken a huge stride in conducting practical classes of zoology in our institution, he added.
Prof Pandey, who is a faculty member of Allahabad University and is on extraordinary leave for working as V-C, further informed that VSL comes with a number of advantages. While on the one hand it allows the teacher to cover syllabus requiring dissections, on the other it also fulfills the UGCs instructions.
“Working on the tablet, the finger of the student works as scissor and forceps. The student could start exploring anatomy and physiology of various animals as many times as he wants, till he has full understanding of the topic,” he said. The entire process is interactive and comes in English and Hindi language and voice over (which can be muted) and the students can flag the parts, take them out and put the same back in the body of dissected animal, be it Earthworm, Cockroach, Locust/Grasshopper frog, rat etc.
The team which has designed and developed the interactive media-rich learning solutions for the university, has also provided its services to reputed organizations across the US, the UK and Europe, he added.
“Teaching zoology is incomplete without performing dissection but not many universities of the country are adopting the concept of virtual labs which is the need of the hour and it is high time that AU should adopt the same,” said a senior faculty member of the department of zoology, Prof U C Srivastava.