Now, even those who didn’t make the cut for admission to the legendary Indian Institutes of Technology can still get an IIT education.
Within the next few months, the seven institutes and the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore plan to stream lectures and course material online, as part of a Rs110 crore government project to help lift generally poor standards at an estimated 1,500 engineering colleges across India.
The development represents an innovative way to address several issues plaguing higher education. The private sector has long complained that engineering graduates arrive ill-equipped to work and need much more training and exposure. Meanwhile, academia finds itself in the midst of a crippling faculty shortage.
“The project is aimed at providing a standard for academic content for both faculty and students across India,” says Mangala Sunder Krishnan, principal coordinator of the project at IIT Madras. “A large number of private institutions have entered the field of engineering education with inadequate faculty support and training.”
Education for all: Students at the computer lab in IIT Bombay.
Students and faculty will be able to access lecture videos and course material by logging on to a search engine.
“We are in advanced stages of discussions with a few service providers to provide our course content on a non-exclusive basis,” says Kannan Moudgalya, head of IIT Bombay’s distance engineering education programme.
This initiative stems from the National Programme for Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL), a project that was initially conceptualized by the faculty at IIT Madras and has been under development since 2003.
“The days of gurukulam are now being redesigned,” says M.S. Ananth, IIT Madras’ director and national programme coordinator of NPTEL. He refers to the shift in how knowledge can increasingly reach Indians instead of a privileged few.
A gurukulam is a sort of residential school popular in ancient India.
While some course material is already available on the NPTEL site, an alliance with service providers—Google has been mentioned—would make both text and videos available at one location.
Google India said it could not comment specifically on a venture with IIT. “Google is very committed to making our products as locally relevant and useful as possible, but we have nothing specific to share at this time,” a company spokesperson said in an email.
Many of the courses that will go online, especially core science and engineering curricula, are similar across IITs and, to a lesser extent, other institutions in the country.
The ministry of human resource development, which oversees education, has already invested Rs20.5 crore in the completed phase I of the project. For that, the institutions developed 240 courses in five streams of engineering—civil, computer science, electronics and communication, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering.