Chennai: The National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) is offering 226 courses in January 2018. This is higher than the 159 courses offered in the last semester. Enrolments (http://nptel.ac.in/) close on 22 January 2018 for 90 courses and on 5 February 2018 for the rest.
Courses on current technology such as such as Data mining, Machine Learning, Business Analytics with Cloud Computing and Internet of Things (IoT) are being offered for a second consecutive term due to their popular demand. Other courses are on topics such as Business English, Spoken English and soft skills. Other institutes of repute such as IISER-Mohali, IIIT Bangalore are joining the NPTEL family to offer courses which broadens the scope of courses offered.
Speaking about the NPTEL courses, Prof. Andrew Thangaraj, NPTEL coordinator at IIT Madras, said, “NPTEL has opened the doors of high-quality college-level education to everyone through its online course and certification program conducted by faculty from premier Indian institutes and universities. For students, credit transfer is increasingly becoming possible for NPTEL courses with support from MHRD, UGC and AICTE. ”
NPTEL is also officially partnering with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) to provide technical content and tutorials for training purposes (www.ciiedugateway.org). Through this partnership, they would explore how the training can be extended to meet industry requirements and come up with joint programmes to fill the gaps in education. The objective is to make fresh college graduates employable and job-ready. NPTEL works with more than 1,300 colleges across India. CII will help close the loop between academia, industry and colleges by connecting them through this initiative.
NPTEL has also started getting requests from outside India and Local Chapters have been established in Afghanistan and Ethiopia.
Industry Initiatives
Further, NPTEL is also launching an ‘NPTEL Industry Associate Programme’ where companies can partner with NPTEL to get their employees trained and reskilled using these courses, with zero financial implication.
Companies can use these courses for training fresh hires, for reskilling of existing employees too. There are no financials involved for becoming an Industry Associate. NPTEL also has a huge pool of human resources trained in various skills and engineering disciplines, by completing the NPTEL online courses successfully and the companies can also fill their recruitment needs by accessing this talent pool. This would allow the industry to get course-related information from NPTEL, get access to enrolment/examination registration details as well as the performance of the employees belong to the company.
The Highlights of last semester include: more than 10.27 lakh enrolments and 70,000 registrations. An engineer from Turkey flew to India to attend the certification examinations on Acoustics and Noise control.
NPTEL was initiated by seven Indian Institutes of Technology (Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras, Guwahati and Roorkee) along with the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 2003. The online courses cover all disciplines of Engineering such as Biotechnology, Ocean Engineering and, Metallurgical Sciences apart from the popular courses such as Computer Science Engineering or Electrical Engineering.
NPTEL is the largest provider of MOOCs in India today, especially the Engineering stream, with a credible proctored certification exam that clearly qualifies and differentiates the learners who do these courses.
