New tools for tech studies
K. RAMACHANDRAN
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A collaborative effort to create content for online engineering studies is starting to pay off.
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Photo: K. Gajendran
BEYOND THE CLASSROOM: Streaming video and downloadable lectures.
Phase I of the National Programme for Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) now anchored by the IIT-Madras, is about to end.
Its second phase will now seek to use the massive digital resources built in the Phase I, to reach out to colleges around the country and thus address the shortage of teachers in engineering and management education better than previous efforts.
Simultaneously, the digital resources repository is also being scaled up, to include more courses spanning across more engineering disciplines.
The repository now built up includes 230 engineering courses in the five major disciplines - Civil, Electrical, Mechanical, Electronics and Computer Sciences, besides the core courses in maths physics and Chemistry, studied by the engineering students in the initial years of any BE / B.Tech degree as per AICTE curriculum.
These courses are now in web and video format, says one of NPTEL's coordinators for web-bsaed courseware, K Mangala Sundar of IIT-Madras. These courses are now available over the Internet through free registration, and are being accessed by more than 80,000 registrants.
About 45 per cent of them are working professionals, who have given positive feedback on the quality of the content, he notes.
A slightly lower percentage represents students not only in India but even outside the country (30,000 of the users are from the U.S alone).
The chairman of the programme implementation committee, and Director IIT-Madras, M.S. Ananth, who has been highlighting the shortage of trained teachers in engineering education, is a votary of using the digital media not merely for addressing the issue of teacher shortage, but also improving the quality of the content and the teaching learning process in professional engineering education.
Prof. Ananth now looks to conduct workshops to co-opt more teachers in other universities and colleges to increase the number of courses in web format.
In the second phase NPTEL proposes some major developments, such as:
Query management: where there would be a dedicated set of subject experts to answer learner questions online at all times. In the process, a big base of FAQs is likely to emerge.
Chat rooms and bulletin boards, which will enhance the learners' experience in the virtual space.
In phase II the online video format will become streaming video and also the courseware will be captured in DVDs, which individual students or organisations can get for a nominal fee and upload them in their own servers for local streaming.
About 500 more courses in newer engineering areas such as Chemical, Biotechnology, Metallurgy, Textiles, Aeronautical engineering branches, Maths, Physics and Chemistry for UG and PG, besides management sciences.
"The idea is to reach out to as many people as possible so that high quality courses, and lectures are available on demand any time. Of course, we will encourage the buyers of the courses also to adopt and adapt the, because NPTEL courseware will only be a core or minimum according to the AICTE's standardised curriculum," notes Dr. Mangala Sundar.
One well known web-based model for courseware is the Open CourseWare of the MIT-Boston in the United States. But then Dr. Sundar says NPTEL differs in paradigm, and quality of content. Whereas the open courseware made available online by the MIT is lectures for their own courses, the NPTEL's online courseware seeks to address a national problem of lowerr quality of teaching and content.
"The whole exercise has brought together the knowledge of professors of the eight best institutions, namely the IITs, which normally can be said to be professional rivals in engineering education. They have come together to improve the learning process in professional education in the country," Prof. Sundar adds.
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