IITs, IISc to take engineering to rural areas

In a bid to take engineering education to rural areas, IITs and IISc have planned to launch National Pro­gr­a­mme on Technology Enha­n­ced Learning (NPTEL) with subtitles in regional languages like Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada.
“Our open and online lea­rning initiative has become a huge success with over 25,000 visitors hitting NPT­EL’s portal every day and NPTEL page on Youtube has reached 94 million vie­wers ever since it was started in November 2007”, Prof. Mangala Sunder Krishnan, web coordinator (NPTEL) and professor of Chemistry at IIT, Madras, said.
Prof Mangala Sunder pointed out that as some students had difficulty to understand the faculty’s accent on the video they decided to transcribe lectures at the bottom of the video.
“Now we have the caption in English but soon we will come out in regional languages like Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada. We have asked a private company to help us in translating English captions into regional languages”, he said.
NPTEL offers video lectures and text content for 640 courses from wide ranging subjects like engineering, humanities and social sciences. Listing out new initiatives in NPTEL, the IIT-M coordinator said the new learning platform offers option for students to interact with the faculty to ask them questions.
Arjit Mukhopadhyay, an M.Tech (chemical engineering) student, who joined IIT-M learning courses through NPTEL narrated his success story.
“I studied B.Tech in an engineering college in Kolkata and started to learn using NPTEL from the second year to crack GATE to join IIT. I use to watch video lectures for about two hours every day and attempt assignments, which helped me a lot to clear GATE for admission to M.Tech”, he noted.
Ankit jauhari, another student who benefited from NPTEL noted that he had to use NPTEL to learn engineering subjects, as quality of teaching in his college was abysmal. “I used NPTEL lectures to learn basics to clear GATE as we need extra coaching to take up this difficult exam”, he added.

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