AU to set up learning resources network

ALLAHABAD UNIVERSITY (AU) has chalked out an ambitious plan to revive its defunct Wide Area Network (WAN) to inter-connect all of its faculties and departments and upgrade it to a full-fledged Allahabad University Learning Resources Network (AULERNET).

The AULERNET, it is hoped, would help the varsity adopt an integrated approach to cross-disciplinary learning and research and help it truly arrive in the 21st century.

It is expected to optimise the sharing of IT-assisted academic resources and linking up AU with world-wide information and data repositories.

Under the initiative, the AU officials have earmarked Rs 20 lakh of the supplementary annual grant for 2005-06 received from the University Grants Commission (UGC). They have sought another Rs 50 lakh from the UGC under the annual plan grant for 2006-07 to upgrade the campus-wide fibre-optic network into AULERNET.

As per the project, finalised under the supervision of the AU Vice-Chancellor Prof Rajen Harshe, once fully functional, as many as 2500 computers could get connected to the nodes with the fibre-optic cable functioning as the backbone of the network. Switches, needed to energise the signals, have already been put in place in various departments and once the funds come, would be serviced and put into functioning order.

The plan also envisages the uplinking 2 Mbps leased line to be upgraded to 8 Mbps so that data downloading and uploading time gets reduced significantly.
Today, AU is paying Rs 17 lakh per year that it gets from the UGC to the ERNET to avail online access to various academic resources like costly journals, e-journals, and research data banks through participation in the INFLIBNET initiative. However, thanks to the defunct WAN, AU is among the varsities that is scoring the lowest hits on the sites available through this facility in the country.

Realising that this needs to be checked immediately, AU also plans to connect all of its hostels through the WAN and encourage students and research scholars to make full use of the facilities available through the ERNET initiative.

"The vision is to develop AULERNET into such a fool-proof network with different people having different and unique access codes and varying using rights that it could one day even be used for proper administration of the varsity, speeding up of the examination process by online question paper making and saving time in the marks awarding process too.

This will be needed if the varsity really wants to introduce the semester system," informed a teacher closely associated with the AULERNET initiative of the varsity.

We could even have all the information and records of our students, employees and teachers online that would usher in a new era of transparency, ease in administration and speedy day-to-day functioning of the university, the teacher added.