Free E-Learning Course Materials (IIT, IISc) and Videos on NPTEL Portal

NPTEL (National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning) provides E-learning through online Web and Video courses in Engineering, Science and humanities streams. The mission of NPTEL is to enhance the quality of Engineering education in the country by providing free online courseware. It is an initiative by seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT Bombay, Delhi, Guwahati, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras and Roorkee) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc) for creating course contents in engineering and science.

NPTEL as a project originated from many deliberations between IITs, Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) during the years 1999-2003. A proposal was jointly put forward by five IITs (Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur and Madras) and IISc for creating contents for 100 courses as web based supplements and 100 complete video courses, for forty hours of duration per course. Web supplements were expected to cover materials that could be delivered in approximately forty hours.

[advt]Five engineering branches (Civil, Computer Science, Electrical, Electronics and Communication and Mechanical) and core science programmes that all engineering students are required to take in their undergraduate engineering programme in India were chosen initially. Contents for the above courses were based on the model curriculum suggested by All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and the syllabi of major affiliating Universities in India.

In phase I, which was completed recently, course materials have been developed for approximately 125 web courses and are accessible freely through the website http://nptel.iitm.ac.in. Lecture contents are also being made available for 135 video courses. Both the web and video courses cover five major engineering disciplines and the core science curriculum that all engineers must have, and are distributed as follows:

(*The numbers are likely to change soon as the web site is being continuously updated)

The content generation is spread across all eight institutions. The video content is available in MPEG-4 format with a bit-rate of 512 kbps with H.264 compression for streaming through the Internet. They are accessible freely through the YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/iit. Web contents and access to embedded video lectures from youtube are available free of cost through the website http://nptel.iitm.ac.in. NPTEL acknowledges with gratitude the free bandwidth offer for hosting the academic channel by Google Inc

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