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The Golden Jubilee Year: IIT Madras - 2008-09
Courses on the web
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A look at the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL)
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Prof. K. Mangala Sunder,
Department of Chemistry and National Web Courses Coordinator
The Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, has funded this programme, which is coordinated by IIT Madras and executed jointly by all seven Indian Institutes of Technology (Bombay, Delhi, Guwahati, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras and Roorkee) and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. The NPTEL has developed curricula and full course contents for more than 230 engineering courses in five disciplines at the undergraduate level. The course contents have been designed using model curricula proposed by the All India Council of Technical Education and several leading affiliating Universities in India. More than 350 faculty members from the above Institutions have participated to develop the courses.
The NPTEL offers courses for engineering students in the disciplines of Civil Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Communication Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Core sciences, Management and Languages. The courses have been prepared in two formats, namely as web based lectures, slides, chapters or modules with animations, or as a sequence of thirty to forty video recorded lectures of one hour duration each. They are modularized in such a way that a large part of each course covers basic learning materials in the course across different University syllabi.
The programme of standardized content creation through NPTEL by the IITs and the IISc and making it available freely to every citizen of India (and of course, through the Internet, to anyone in the world) is a first step to provide institutions facing the scarcity of teachers, with curricula that are standard and which can be adopted by their existing faculty to offer quality education.
The web contents are freely available in the NPTEL website and the video contents are continuously being uploaded in streaming media format as embedded in the NPTEL site with bandwidth and storage provided freely by YouTube, the video channel of Google Inc. More than 2200 lectures in the above disciplines are already available for free access. The remaining 2500 to 3000 hours will also be uploaded before the end of this year to enable access to high quality learning content to anyone in the globe. The URLs for these sites are http://nptel.iitm.ac.in and http://www.youtube.com/iit.
The second phase of NPTEL which is sanctioned in principle covers all the remaining engineering and pure science disciplines. It will also update the courses already available by providing supplements and question banks, case studies, etc. It will include participation in content creation by the National Institutes of Technology and leading academic institutions throughout India. In addition, user interactions through queries and building of Frequently Asked Questions in each subject, collaborative learning, extensive teacher training through several hundred course-specific workshops, and interactive learning and assessment are part of the activities to be carried out. The ultimate goal is to empower every citizen of India with a quality of leaning and training that he/she is entitled to with minimal costs and with the help of the best Indian teachers. It will use the relevant technological and pedagogical tools to provide opportunities for lifelong and continuous learning.
The Golden Jubilee Year: IIT Madras - 2008-09
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