Indian academia and industry are coming together for an online education initiative

Updated on: Friday, April 12, 2013

Some of the biggest names in Indian academia and industry are coming together for an online education initiative, which will provide certification in courses from top institutes and upgrade the quality of the workforce.

The National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) is led by IIT and IISc and has Google, Nasscom, TCS, Cognizant and Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs) as partners. The web-based courses went online in October 2012.

From July, NPTEL will offer course certification with live exams at the end. It will move to massive open online course platform, which may be provided by Google's Coursebuilder or Harvard and MIT-promoted online course platform edX, or both.

NPTEL will start with certification for three computer science courses — algorithms, data structures and programming languages. While the course is free, a fee will be charged for certification.

The three courses have been developed in association with IT firms TCS and Cognizant, which are giving inputs for course material and allowing NPTEL to use their centres across the country for the final exams. Nasscom is supporting the venture and Infosys and Wipro are expected to join. Faculty from seven IIITs are providing inputs for course material.

professor K Mangala Sunder, national coordinator of NPTEL said, "IT companies want to improve quality of education and are working with IIT faculty. It is not a replacement for in-house training but students will be better qualified."

NPTEL is looking for a software platform to host its content along the lines of international providers Coursera and edX. Both Coursera and edX have millions of users, and Indians account for about 15%, second only to the US. The NPTEL channel, currently on YouTube, has 1.5 lakh subscribers and 8.7 crore views.

Moving to a platform like Coursebuilder will allow NPTEL to provide more students with a full course experience with personalised pages to track their progress.

While most international sites like Coursera and edX provide honour certificates with online-only exams, NPTEL will offer a proctored certificate with supervised exams at the end of the course which will be conducted across the country on weekends.

"The certification exam can be taken any time like the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) and Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT)," said IIT-Madras professor K Mangala Sunder, who is the national coordinator of NPTEL.

NPTEL's industry partners, which include IT majors TCS and Cognizant, are not only providing inputs for content but also mentoring groups of students. "The mentors will be company employees who are senior programmers," he said. Companies are providing their facilities for final certificate examinations for a fee to be paid by NPTEL.

The inputs from IT companies and the certification are expected to improve the quality of graduates. "Although there is no written commitment, the understanding is that the companies will consider people who fare well in these courses for recruitment," said Andrew Thangaraj, IIT-M professor and head of the certification process.

NPTEL officials are debating whether to include the progress of a student during the course in the final certification or just the marks. "The course will be free but we will charge a token fee for certification to meet some of the expenses," said Thangaraj.

Separate from certification initiative, NPTEL is planning 'Special Lectures'. Eminent academicians and industrialists will prepare a series of video lectures on topics ranging from mathematics to Ayurveda. "It will be like a TED talk given by a learned and experienced personality, not one but a series of lectures on various topics," said Sunder.

NPTEL is transcribing all its video lectures and offering them as text and audio files. This will be launched on [email protected]. Of the 20,000 courses on offer, 2,500 have been transcribed. Videos will also be sub-titled so that students from all language backgrounds can use the material. NPTEL is looking to develop speech-to-text for various Indian languages so that complete course material is available to all students.

Indian academia and industry are coming together for an online education initiative

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