Education channel of YouTube completes a year

Updated on: Monday, April 05, 2010

The education channel of YouTube has just completed a year of operation and now offers access to more than 350 full higher education courses from institutions worldwide, including videos from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (IISc.).

A YouTube source said that the channel had formed partnerships with over 300 universities and colleges worldwide, including University of Cambridge, Yale, Stanford, MIT and University of Chicago.

It now has video material pertaining to university courses in seven languages and from as many as 10 countries.

The Edu channel video library has over 6.5 lakh videos. It was launched a year ago (www.youtube.com/edu) with the mission of delivering "some of the world's greatest university courses to anyone with an Internet connection and a screen."

YouTube was also trying to make its video content more accessible, offering features such as automated captions and auto-translation to videos in English. Adding captions and translation of courses into any of 50 languages was possible with "just a few clicks".

It is video content created under the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning that is available on YouTube.

NPTEL was launched some years ago to improve the quality of engineering education by developing curriculum-based video and web courses, which is being undertaken by the IITs and the IISc, Bangalore.

The NPTEL video content is available in the MPEG-4 format and can be accessed free from the URL: http://www.youtube.com/iit. The content is also available through the NPTEL website http://nptel.iitm.ac.in.

The site now offers 120 video courses in branches such as civil engineering, computer science and engineering, electrical engineering, electronics engineering and mechanical engineering, apart from a set of basic courses.

Education channel of YouTube completes a year

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