NPTEL

The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has made it mandatory for engineering institutes in Mumbai and across the country to use the online lectures and study material designed by the IIT.The material available online is under the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL), a joint venture by the seven IITs - Bombay, Delhi, Guwahati, Madras, Kanpur, Kharagpur and Roorkee and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore.At present, nearly 150 engineering institutes across the country access the material free of cost on You Tube and other sites.AICTE has even asked the institutes to update their libraries accordingly. This access will be free of cost.The IIT online course content would also help students in our engineering colleges to enhance their knowledge.The idea is to cater to the large number of students who are unable to attend scholarly institutions. Through NPTEL, they will now have an access to quality content from IIT.IITs are also implementing the second phase of the project and plan to introduce around 950 courses in basic sciences and engineering, within the next two years on NPTEL.In the first phase of NPTEL, 250 courses have been developed. Around 4,500 hours of this content is available online for free. NPTEL, a project by IIT, was launched around four years ago to improve the quality of engineering education in the country by developing curriculum-based video and web courses.It was started along the lines of Open Courseware by MIT in the US. However, access to this content was charged. Now, it can be accessed freely on the Web. NPTEL has 4,400 videos on YouTube for 120 courses .