Tuesday, June 29, 2010

National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL)

The National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL, in short) aims to enhance the quality of education (mostly engineering and science) in India (and worldwide) by developing curriculum based video and web courses. Phase I of the programme has been completed and a much more ambitious Phase II of the programme is ongoing -- the number of courses will touch around 500. Roughly, each video course consists of around 40 lectures, each around 50 minutes long. Many of the lectures are now available online through the NPTEL website as well as YouTube. Most of the lectures are given by faculty members of IIT's/IISc and other institutions from India. It would be interesting to see its impact in the long run. The spirit of the programme is similar to MIT Open Courseware and in a sense, complements what is on offer there.