Every once in a while, one of the 450-odd professors at IIT Bombay will lock himself up in an empty lecture theatre, and hold forth on fluid dynamics, mechanical engineering, or the behaviour of electrons in a vacuum, with only a silent camera for an audience—listening and recording his peroration.
Under NPTEL, a project started in 2005 by the government to digitise classroom content and make it freely available, professors in institutions such as IIT Bombay are “teaching” students who didn’t clear entrance exams by recording courseware and releasing it online, which are available on YouTube (the IIT channel has over 42,000 registered users and has been viewed 2.5 crore times since November 2007). Enthusiasts and existing IIT students who want to refresh their memory before exams are the key audience.
NPTEL will get Rs 100 crore to fund its next phase, under which volunteer teachers will record 150-200 courses for free access, as compared to the handful of courses now available. Normal education at the IITs is not disturbed—lectures specially designed for this project are delivered, recorded and uploaded in a separate studio. The lectures are also sold, in dvd form, on demand.
In addition to online material, work is about to begin on converting the video lessons into textbook format. This is an apparent reversal, but it does make sense: “The same lessons taught on video should reach people who do not have broadband access. For this, we’re going to start turning the video lectures into printed books cheaply priced,” says Prof Shishir Jha, who leads the project. Around 90 lecturers from each of the IITs currently participate in the programme.
The OpenCourseWare Consortium, an international organisation, has also roped in iim Bangalore to participate in sharing similar classroom sessions with a wider audience for free. In all, about 600 courses across disciplines will be available for free by the end of 2012. At present, the estimate is that about 70 lakh students have accessed open courses in India, while around a 100 institutions have bought, from IIT and others, their recorded open lectures.
.jpg?auto=format%2Ccompress&fit=max&format=webp&w=376&dpr=2.0)
