IIT’s To Take 600 Courses Online By 2011!
Everything seems to be happening online these days, from marking love berths to saving a whole community. Recently in news, Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, are preparing to release 600 online courses in 2011.
National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) – phase I certainly got an effective response that made them introduce the online exposure to their courses. And, 600 for that! According to Prof. M. S. Ananth, Director IIT Madras, the site is being visited by 1.5 billion people so far with 5,400 visitors everyday. The second Phase will take some time but is fundedunder National ICT mission for Rs 96 crore. These courses will be free to the students, as said by Prof. Ananth.
At WATBlog, we’ve seen examples of companies investing in the educational sector like the one when Helix Investments has invested $10 million in LearningMate Solutions, a provider of e-learning education solutions. Being widely divided into different segments like offline test prep, pre-school, vocational training, corporate training, distance e-learning, education content, Learning Management solutions for education institutes, gives the e-learning sector a big boost.
Other Institutions such as NITs and major University faculty are also likely to participate. Making the previous figure of 350 faculty members in all partner institutions for the Phase-I, to 1000 faculty members.
We’ve already had instances where IITs have targeted the online medium because of it’s reach to most of their students and aspirants. Then the plan was a part of a Rs. 110 crore government project to help lift the academic standards especially in the fields of Science and Engineering as the private sector has always complained that engineering graduates from approximately 1500 engineering institutions across India other than IIT’s are ill-equipped when they come to work.
Entrance exams and Lectures online won’t just let students slouch in the chair and attend them, but also make it more convenient to be watched over and over. Videos available in MPEG-4 format with a bit-rate of 512 kbps with H.264 compression for streaming through the Internet, can be accessed through their YouTube channel. Web contents and access to embedded video lectures from YouTube are available free of cost through the NPTEL website.
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