IIT Madras gets grant from Google

The Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M), which recently introduced engineering courses on Google and YouTube, is set to get up to Rs 50 lakh as an academic grant from Google to fund its National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL). The US-headquartered search giant is helping IIT-M develop a text-based search engine to index its video courses. The company will provide the grant to IIT-M in a few months.

NPTEL plans to enhance the quality of engineering education in the country by developing curriculum-based video and web courses. Seven IITs and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, have collaborated to carry out the venture. The IITs have been nominated as the fourth-best institutions in providing free university courses.

“NPTEL was started with the idea of reaching people and teaching them by the means they possess. We do provide content to government colleges, government aided colleges and private universities too,” said Mangala Sunder Krishnan, National Web Courses Coordinator, IIT-Madras.

NPTEL in the first phase of the project, has developed around 250 courses. All of these are available online for a duration of 4,500 hours, free of charge. The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) has sponsored the project with Rs 20 crore. In the second phase, the institute has asked for Rs 50 crore from the MHRD. The institute will double the of number of courses and will also conduct 200 workshops for the faculty involved to train themselves. The second phase will be complete in three years.

The course materials (both web and video) are freely accessible by everyone independent of their geographic location. “Professionals can use these courses to update themselves. Open and distance education using NPTEL contents are long-term prospects for IITs,” added Krishnan.

Over 90 government institutes, government aided institutes and private institutes are using the services of NPTEL. IIT-M distributes web contents free of charge to the government-funded institutes. The institutes, which require video content, pay a minimum sum of Rs 15,000 to the institute to cover the cost of three 500 GB SATA hard disks and postage.

It also allows the content to be hosted on a website local to the institutions (intranet). Privately-funded institutions can obtain the entire web course contents on DVD ROMs for hosting them on their Intranet for a fee of Rs 1 lakh. NPTEL was started along the lines of Open Courseware by MIT in the US.