• What is NPTEL?
• Why NPTEL?
• Is it along the lines of OCW (Open Courseware by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)?
• How is NPTEL implemented?
• What is there for industries in NPTEL?
• What is the current status of the project?
• How will NPTEL help the community?
• What are the mechanisms for promoting NPTEL?
• Who owns the copyrights of the contents of NPTEL ?
• How do Institutions access these contents?
• How do individuals access these contents?
• Can I download these lectures?
• Wherein lies the future?

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

NPTEL as a project originated from many deliberations between IITs, Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) during the years 1999-2003. A proposal was jointly put forward by five IITs (Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur and Madras) and IISc for creating contents for 100 courses as web based supplements and 100 complete video courses, for forty hours of duration per course. Web supplements were expected to cover materials that could be delivered in approximately forty hours. Five engineering branches (Civil, Computer Science, Electrical, Electronics and Communication and Mechanical) and core science programmes that all engineering students are required to take in their undergraduate engineering programme in India were chosen initially. Contents for the above courses were based on the model curriculum suggested by All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and the syllabi of major affiliating Universities in India.

• The basic objective of science and engineering education in India is to devise and guide reforms that will transform India into a strong and vibrant knowledge economy. In this context, the focus areas for NPTEL project have been i) higher education, ii) professional education, iii) distance education and iv) continuous and open learning, roughly in that order of preference.
  
  
• Manpower requirement for trained engineers and technologists is far more than the number of qualified graduates that Indian technical institutions can provide currently. Among these, the number of institutions having fully qualified and trained teachers in all disciplines being taught forms a small fraction. A majority of teachers are young and inexperienced and are undergraduate degree holders. Therefore, it is important for institutions like IITs, IISc, NITs and other leading Universities in India to disseminate teaching/learning content of high quality through all available media. NPTEL would be among the foremost and an important step in this direction and will use technology for dissemination.
  
  
• India needs many more teachers for effective implementation of higher education in professional courses. Therefore, methods for training young and inexperienced teachers to enable them carry out their academic responsibilities effectively are a must. NPTEL contents can be used as core curriculum content for training purposes.
  
  
• A large number of students who are unable to attend scholarly institutions through NPTEL will have access to quality content from them.
  

All those who are gainfully employed in industries and all other walks of life and who require continuous training and updating their knowledge can benefit from well-developed and peer-reviewed course contents by the IITs and IISc.

The answer is yes and no. The goals are the same, but the processes are different. Open courseware project by the MIT makes available course materials by Professors of MIT freely to the rest of the world. OCW also encourages self-learners. It is a laudable exercise no doubt and has recorded millions of visits by students and teachers all over the world.

NPTEL also has proposed to provide open course materials for engineering and science students and teachers (freely). The differences between the two programmes are as follows:

• NPTEL is a curriculum building exercise and is directed towards providing learning materials in Science and Engineering by adhering to the syllabi of All India Council for Technical Education and the slightly modified curricula of major affiliating Universities. The NPTEL faculty have modularized their courses into core concepts which every one of these institutions may teach and topics which are add-ons to the course. The courses are well structured and are elaborate with details wherever the faculty members have felt the need. Institutions are encouraged to build their own versions of NPTEL courses based on their curriculum design using the NPTEL materials and collective experience of all IITs and IISc in TEL. They are meant to fill the large gap that exists between the current expertise level of faculty in institutions of higher learning such as the IITs/IISc and those in private and other government aided engineering institutions in India.
  
  
• Secondly, the focus is to build at least one version of each course offered in all of Science and Engineering in India, from B.Tech. / B.Sc. to Ph. D. programs.
  
  
• Thirdly, NPTEL courses will be taken to the teachers through many workshops both at present and in the future. The interaction between teachers in various colleges and the course developers in IITs/IISc is a mandatory requirement for NPTEL.
  
  
• The fourth aspect is to build in the immediate future, a course-specific web space for each course where students, teachers and other users anywhere in India and outside would be encouraged to create threaded discussions. In this area, direct interaction among students all over the world and teachers would be encouraged through a bulletin-board approach/threaded discussions with the help of moderators who would be appointed for this purpose. The purpose is to eventually build a digital library for each subject and create Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for the section.
  
  
• The fifth aspect of difference between NPTEL and OCW is that there are 110 video (approximately 4500 hours) lecture courses from phase I and there will be about 400 video lecture courses (with about 16000 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 and will be helpful to everyone who is interested in enhancing his/her learning.
  
  

Despite these differences between MIT OCW and NPTEL, it is important to recognize that the goals of these two programmes are absolutely the same- educate, get educated with technology and prosper. In India, the means have to be different given the complexity of the problem of education.

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4. How is NPTEL implemented?

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5. What is there for industries in NPTEL?

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6. What is the current status of the project?

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7. How will NPTEL help the community?

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8. What are the mechanisms for promoting NPTEL?

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9. Who owns the copyrights of the contents of NPTEL ?

The copyrights are owned jointly by the MHRD, IITs/IISc and the faculty. MHRD has encouraged faculty to convert their electronic content to text books in various engineering and science subjects (which will not affect what is freely available). The rest of the issues are being studied carefully at present. Barring a few courses, the rest of the materials are likely to be distributed under a Creative Commons license in the future.

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10. How do Institutions access these contents?

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11. How do individuals access these contents?

Yes, you can if you have broadband connectivity. You may need to download both Flash player and Real media player. Please go to the website http://www.youtube.com/iit.and click on the �playlists� link above the video window. You will see the list of all courses currently available. Click on your choice and then the first 10 lectures of the courses will appear with links. For the remaining lectures, there are links at the bottom of that page. Click on the lecture title to view the lecture. At the top right hand corner you might find �Download this video� option. Click and then save the file to your computer.

Please note that to keep the audio and video quality of the lectures high for self-learning the file format has been chosen deliberately at MPG-4, H-264 version at a bit rate of 512 kbps. Therefore the file size for each lecture varies between 200 to 300mb. We are currently working on redistributing each video with appropriate indexing and a number of contiguous files of smaller sizes.

India is a vast country whose engineering student population outnumbers every other country, except possibly China. 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. In addition, helping colleges through workshops and discussion boards for implementing NPTEL content in their curriculum will be undertaken as a primary and most important activity. This is the most significant difference between open educational resources developed worldwide and NPTEL. IIT/IISc faculty would be encouraged to incorporate feedback from user community in their courses and update them.

It is one of the fundamental goals of the project to bring in all the best teachers in the country under the umbrella of NPTEL and record their lectures/seek their collaboration with IITs/IISc and make their courses available for the community under free and open sources agreement. There is already a move to create open virtual laboratories in the Internet for engineering subjects initiated by IIT Delhi which is extremely important for our country. Another primary objective is to forge strong ties with major academic initiatives worldwide such as MIT OCW, Commonwealth of Learning, British Open University, Australian Open Universities and Digital Library initiatives (to mention a few) and with industry for developing new technological tools for learning and dissemination. The number of things that must be done simultaneously is enormous. IITs and IISc must rise to the challenge of education in India posed by the unprecedented and rapid economic growth and the opportunities it provides for globalizing the pool of scientific and technical talent in the country. Together everyone WILL prosper.