A boost to quality engineering teaching

Updated on: Tuesday, January 04, 2011

For the plethora of engineering colleges struggling to find the right faculty, the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) has come in handy for delivering quality content jointly created by seven Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science.

Contents in five engineering branches — Civil, Computer Science, Electrical, Electronics and Communication, and Mechanical — have been created based on the model curriculum suggested by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and the syllabi of major affiliating universities in the country.

Since a majority of teachers are young and inexperienced and undergraduate degree holders, it has become imperative for the IITs, IISc, NITs and other leading universities to disseminate teaching/learning content of high quality. And the NPTEL contents have been envisaged as core curriculum content for training purposes. Under NPTEL, which is implemented by the National Programme Committee headed by the Joint Secretary of Higher Education, MHRD, and the Programme Implementation Committee headed by M.S. Ananth, Director IIT Madras, open course materials for engineering and science students and teachers have been provided free of cost.

There are 125 web courses accessible through the website http://nptel.iitm.ac.in and 135 video lecture courses in addition to the large repositories of video lectures prepared by the IITs. The video content is available in MPEG-4 format with a bit-rate of 512 kbps.

Video courses on Ocean Engineering, Biotechnology, Metallurgy and Mining were also added in the recent past. At the end of the second phase in which participation of over 1,000 faculty members from NITs and major universities have been enlisted, there will be about 400 video lecture courses (with about 16,000 hours of lectures). When it is completed, the NPTEL will carry the distinction of being the largest video repository of technical lecture-courses in the world. According to the vice-chancellor of Periyar University, Salem, K. Muthucheliyan, the value addition to the courses will be enormous if right partnerships are forged between industry and academia. Alongside training students on specific subjects and offering them financial rewards and career opportunities, industries can contribute to the process of creation of contents in several new courses and create courses that are not part of the AICTE curricula but which would address their requirements, he said.

The several mechanisms proposed for promoting NPTEL include conduct of course-specific workshops by bringing together the faculty who have developed the course and the teachers who are likely to use the lecture material; creating subject index and keyword search for both video and web materials so that students can search for relevant material across courses through a search engine; creating and making available a course-specific Edupedia (similar to the concept of Wikipedia) with the help of qualified teachers across the country and a digital library relevant to course material; encouraging teachers in various colleges to adapt to the materials for preparing localised versions suitable for their respective examination system; and sharing the expertise on e-learning, content development and content dissemination with interested institutions so that they can set up their own e-learning portals.

A boost to quality engineering teaching

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