IITs are opening their doors to the world; lectures from IIT classrooms will soon
be available on Apples multi-media platform iTunes
The Indian Institutes of Technology have agreed to a proposal
by the Big Daddy of engineering, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),
to join their Open Course Ware (OCW) community. This move will enable
MIT students to access classroom content of the IITs online at a click of the mouse.
However, this is not the only way by which the IITs are opening their doors to the
world; lectures from IIT classrooms will soon be available on Apples multi-media
platform iTunes. You Tube already has a separate channel for IIT courses, which,
as of December 2011, had 63.64 lakh viewers. When MIT had first invited the IITs
to join the OCW community in 2007, the IITs felt their initiatives were too young
to join the world of open source learning. But four years on, the IITs feel that
they have caught up with the other members of the open source community, who had
started making their course material public a long time ago.
Several other universities like Yale, Peking, Harvard Law School, Notre Dame, Tufts,
UC Irvine and Utah State have allowed MIT to host links to their courseware. The
Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, is also a member of MITs Open Course
Ware. We have finally decided to join the Open Education Resource Consortium. This
will help us share open source tools. It's an academic enhancement exercise, said
Mangala Sunder Krishnan, coordinator for the National Programme for Technology Enhanced
Learning (NPTEL), IIT-Madras.
The NPTEL is an IIT initiative on the same lines as OCW. Seven of the old IITs and
the Indian Institute of Science had jointly launched the programme. The NPTEL now
has over a thousand courses in technology and the humanities. But there is an elementary
difference between the efforts put in by the American universities into open courses
and the NPTEL. While the former is an enriching exercise, not completely substituting
class work, the NPTEL encompasses all topics in every course, from their introduction
to the end, allowing students to sit at home and study. More than 500 Indian engineering
colleges have been given the NPTEL content, and students can access it through the
college intranet. The number of visitors on the NPTEL website has also increased
from over 9.37 lakh in 2008 to 44.39 lakh in December 2011.
Courtesy: Times of India
