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Dipti Sonawala
Posted On Monday, May 24, 2010 at 02:28:49 AM
The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has made it mandatory for engineering institutes in Mumbai and across the country to use the online lectures and study material designed by the IIT.
The material available online is under the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL), a joint venture by the seven IITs - Bombay, Delhi, Guwahati, Madras, Kanpur, Kharagpur and Roorkee and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore.
A YouTube grab of one of the tutorials
At present, nearly 150 engineering institutes across the country access the material free of cost on You Tube and other sites.
Professor Mangala Sunder Krishnan, National Web Courses Co-ordinator at IIT-Madras, confirmed the development, saying, “AICTE has even asked the institutes to update their libraries accordingly. This access will be free of cost.”
Dr Prabhat Kumar Sahoo, director and regional officer of Western regional office at Mumbai said, “The IIT online course content would also help students in our engineering colleges to enhance their knowledge.”
An IIT-Bombay spokesperson said, “The idea is to cater to the large number of students who are unable to attend scholarly institutions. Through NPTEL, they will now have an access to quality content from IIT.
“IITs are also implementing the second phase of the project and plan to introduce around 950 courses in basic sciences and engineering, within the next two years on NPTEL.”
In the first phase of NPTEL, 250 courses have been developed. Around 4,500 hours of this content is available online for free.
What is NPTEL?
NPTEL, a project by IIT, was launched around four years ago to improve the quality of engineering education in the country by developing curriculum-based video and web courses.
It was started along the lines of Open Courseware by MIT in the US. However, access to this content was charged. Now, it can be accessed freely on the Web. NPTEL has 4,400 videos on YouTube for 120 courses
Rs 4,600 crores have been spent under National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) till March for launching 129 web courses by Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
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About NPTEL
View courses available online (web/video):
http://nptel.iitm.ac.in/courses.php
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?265877
Open Source learning
Virtual Rendezvous
Lessons from IIT lecturers on YouTube draw millions—and not all of them are laggards
Pragya Singh
Magazine | Jun 28, 2010
Every once in a while, one of the 450-odd professors at IIT Bombay will lock himself up in an empty lecture theatre, and hold forth on fluid dynamics, mechanical engineering, or the behaviour of electrons in a vacuum, with only a silent camera for an audience—listening and recording his peroration.
Under NPTEL, a project started in 2005 by the government to digitise classroom content and make it freely available, professors in institutions such as IIT Bombay are “teaching” students who didn’t clear entrance exams by recording courseware and releasing it online, which are available on YouTube (the IIT channel has over 42,000 registered users and has been viewed 2.5 crore times since November 2007). Enthusiasts and existing IIT students who want to refresh their memory before exams are the key audience.
NPTEL will get Rs 100 crore to fund its next phase, under which volunteer teachers will record 150-200 courses for free access, as compared to the handful of courses now available. Normal education at the IITs is not disturbed—lectures specially designed for this project are delivered, recorded and uploaded in a separate studio. The lectures are also sold, in dvd form, on demand.
In addition to online material, work is about to begin on converting the video lessons into textbook format. This is an apparent reversal, but it does make sense: “The same lessons taught on video should reach people who do not have broadband access. For this, we’re going to start turning the video lectures into printed books cheaply priced,” says Prof Shishir Jha, who leads the project. Around 90 lecturers from each of the IITs currently participate in the programme.
The OpenCourseWare Consortium, an international organisation, has also roped in iim Bangalore to participate in sharing similar classroom sessions with a wider audience for free. In all, about 600 courses across disciplines will be available for free by the end of 2012. At present, the estimate is that about 70 lakh students have accessed open courses in India, while around a 100 institutions have bought, from IIT and others, their recorded open lectures.
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