IITs to launch 600 online courses in 2011

CHENNAI, INDIA: Following the good response from the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning ( NPTEL)- phase I for creating course contents in engineering and science, seven Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, are preparing to release 600 more online courses in 2011.

National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning is an initiative by seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT Bombay, Delhi, Guwahati, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras and Roorkee) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore, for creating course contents in engineering and science, creating web and video-based contents for courses.

The Programme Implementation Committee, headed by Prof. M. S. Ananth, Director IIT Madras told media here on Monday that so far the NPTEL site was visited by 1.5 billion people. “The site gets around 5400 visits per day and it is very heartening to see the response. Some of them told us courses are extraordinarily good,” he said.

“We are now starting the second phase; it will take some time,” he added.

This mission is being funded under National ICT mission. “Under that mission we have been funded to the tune of Rs. 96 crore. We have promised 600 courses and would make these courses free to the students.”

Pointing out that in the first phase of the programme, about 350 faculty members in all partner institutions worked together to deliver lecture contents, Prof Ananth said that this was likely to increase to well over 1000 faculty in the next phase. Other Institutions such as NITs and major University faculty are also likely to participate.

He said, “It is possible, once we organize Virtual Technical University, to give degrees in all disciplines in engineering and sciences.”

In the phase - I, which was completed recently, course materials have been developed for approximately 125 web courses and are accessible freely through the website. Lecture contents are also being made available for 110 video courses. Both the web and video courses cover five major engineering disciplines.

“These courses are carefully chosen and enough care is taken to remove the repetition. These course material could be used in future for the Vitual Tech University on which a pilot study is on,” said Dr Managala Sunder Krishnan, National Web Courses Coordinator, NPTEL.

The objectives in Phase II are to create contents for science and engineering courses in all major disciplines as well as specialized and newly developing interdisciplinary subjects for which there is very little academic expertise in private colleges.

It also aims at to bring in all the best teachers in the country under the umbrella of NPTEL and record their lectures and seek their collaboration with IITs and IISc and make their courses available for the community under free and open sources agreement.

There are 110 video (approximately 4,500 hours) lecture courses from phase I and there will be about 400 video lecture courses (with about 16,000 hours of lectures) at the end of phase II. In addition, IITs have large repositories of video lectures prepared already from their own efforts outside of NPTEL and these are also being made available as free and open educational resources for all.

When this is completed, this will be the largest video repository of technical lecture-courses in the world in the streaming video format

At present, the content generation is spread across all eight institutions. The video content is available in MPEG-4 format with a bit-rate of 512 kbps with H.264 compression for streaming through the Internet.

They are also accessible freely through YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/iit. Web contents and access to embedded video lectures from YouTube are available free of cost through the website http://nptel.iitm.ac.in.

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