Study material for virtual technical varsity to be ready by 2011

Updated on: Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Chennai: Before the end of 2011, the Indian Institutes of Technology will have developed all the essential content material needed to start a virtual technical university, according to M.S. Ananth, director of IIT-Madras, and chairman of the National Project on Technology Enhanced Learning or NPTEL.

Talking to presspersons, Dr.Ananth provided some details of the second phase of NPTEL.

In its first phase, 240 engineering courses were created for the internet, including a YouTube channel of video lectures.

The Union Government has sanctioned Rs.96 crore now for the second phase of NPTEL, a joint venture between the seven older IITs and the Indian Institute of Science that will bring at least 600 more engineering and science courses online, Dr.Ananth said.
Whereas, the project aims for 900 courses before December 2011.

Phase II will expand the scope of disciplines and include M.Tech and even Ph.D level materials.

While the IITs would prepare the content, it was up to the government to craft supportive policies in order to start a virtual technical university, said Dr.Ananth.

Indiaâ€™s policy of allowing foreign education providers into country could prove to be critical, as some of them already have well-established web-based education programmes, the director added.

The other major problem would be finding a partner from the private corporate world to actually administer the university, he said.

With the allotment of 1 GBPS bandwidth for the project in a monthâ€™s time, the NPTEL project has been given a new national server in order to make the videos freely available on its own website, rather than just depending on YouTube.

However, the courses are available in offline formats. Private engineering colleges can buy the web courses in a set of DVDs for Rs.50, 000, while the video courses are available on hard disks for another Rs.50,000. They are available to individual students for just Rs.200 per course.

Study material for virtual technical varsity to be ready by 2011

More Education news