New Delhi: Dhawal Trivedi always wanted to get into an IIT. He didn’t make it and is now studying computers at an engineering college in New Delhi’s Indraprastha University. But he’s still getting an IIT education, with regular lectures from IIT professors, on YouTube.

The IITs and IISc have started putting out lectures on YouTube in a programme funded by the Indian government in partnership with Google owned YouTube. Lectures on five major engineering disciplines at the undergraduate level are available and Dhawal says these are a big help.

The project started by producing content for an education channel and then YouTube happened. Now there are 129 web courses with around 1600 lectures available. According to Dr. M.S.Krishnan, associate professor, IIT Chennai, “We agreed it was the best way to reach out to a large number of people, especially individual users. We signed a non disclosure agreement with them to upload videos on a daily basis”.

25,000 people have viewed the lectures, says YouTube and by end 2008, the IIT team plans to put around 4,500 lectures online. Producing these videos has cost the ministry of human resources development over Rs20 crore and with the success on Youtube, they have plans to expand this concept further.