The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : Content for online tech studies

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Nov 27, 2006
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

Content for online tech studies

K. Ramachandran

PHASE I of the National Programme for Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) now anchored by the IIT-Madras, is about to end.

Its second phase will now seek to use the massive digital resources built in the Phase I, to reach out to colleges around the country and thus address the shortage of teachers in engineering and management education better than previous efforts.

Simultaneously, the digital resources repository is also being scaled up, to include more courses spanning across more engineering disciplines.

The repository now built up includes 230 engineering courses in the five major disciplines - Civil, Electrical, Mechanical, Electronics and Computer Sciences, besides the core courses in maths physics and Chemistry, studied by the engineering students in the initial years of any BE / B.Tech degree as per AICTE curriculum.

These courses are now in web and video format, says one of NPTEL's coordinators for web-bsaed courseware, K Mangala Sundar of IIT-Madras. These courses are now available over the Internet through free registration, and are being accessed by more than 80,000 registrants.

The chairman of the programme implementation committee, and Director IIT-Madras, M.S. Ananth, who has been highlighting the shortage of trained teachers in engineering education, is a votary of using the digital media not merely for addressing the issue of teacher shortage, but also improving the quality of the content and the teaching learning process in professional engineering education.

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