Automated Restructuring of Contents for Virtual Labs

Abstract

Virtual Labs, an initiative of the Ministry of Human Resources and Development, Government of India, is an ambitious project to provide around 100+ virtual labs and thousands of experiments over the world wide web to hundreds of thousands of college students in India. The challenge in building the labs comes from the diversity in the platforms, programming languages, tools, and the IT backgrounds of the lab developers themselves. This paper discusses a particular challenge we encountered in trying to integrate the labs to provide a common look and feel: how to restructure contents of virtual labs to bring them to a common HTML format. The common format eases subsequent development of the lab and its maintenance work. Manual approaches to restructure the contents is inefficient and error prone. We discuss how the restructuring task was done by creating automated scripts to port the lab contents across different lab formats. The automated scripts comprising the tool-kit have been tested with thirty five labs successfully.