1200 IIT courses at home for free

The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) has introduced the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL), which is evolving rapidly. Under the scheme, a large part of the curriculum taught in classrooms at the IITs will be available online.

It is expected that 1,200 courses will be available as open courseware by December 2012.

At present, about 450 engineering courses following the common national curriculum are available online. About 250 of these courses are available as 9,600 free video lectures – each about an hour long. The content is delivered by about 1,400 faculty members from IISc and IITs. The faculty members get an honorarium of up to Rs 2.5 lakh for a course (consisting about 40 video lectures, an hour each). Read more

NPTEL was designed to address the scarcity of quality teachers and PhDs in India. It tied up with Youtube Education, launched globally in 2009, to empower a student to study an engineering course for free, be it civil engineering or mechanical engineering, right at home via streaming videos from the portal. The simple language in which the concepts are explained, and the reference links are being appreciated by users.

In the last two years, the unique users from India visiting the website have increased from 11 million to 33 million per month. The India team of Youtube Education has been working only since last six months.

Recently, Gujarat University has also partnered with YouTube.

Last year, National Knowledge Commission came up with an idea of connecting intellectual resources just by means of a single click to address shortage of good teachers in the country. The National Knowledge Network (NKN) was conceived to share knowledge live via transmission. See details. The NPTEL is one focused part of the NKN, which will surely prove to be a big step in making high quality education accessible for all in India and worldwide.

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