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Journalism of Courage
Aware that they are recognised internationally for quality education, the seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, have decided not to join OpenCourseWare (OCW), a project for providing free online course material initiated by none other than the reputed Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
OCW already hosts courses developed by well-known universities like Yale, Harvard Law School, Notre Dame, Tufts, and Utah State. But the IITs and IISc have declined MIT’s request, made earlier this year, for them to put courses on that site.
“Some of our directors felt that why don’t we keep this to India and not let IITs join OCW? We decided to stick to our brand and keep our project parallel to that of MIT’s,” said Prof M S Ananth, director of IIT Madras and national co-ordinator for the IITs’ own free online courses under the National Programme for Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL), which MIT was seeking to upload on OCW.
He said the objective of both, NPTEL and OCW, was the same — distributing education free of cost — but the IITs would rather have MIT join the NPTEL initiative: “MIT courses could be uploaded as electives later in our project. We have not snapped links with MIT and we could get them on board in future.”
While MIT’s project displays lecture notes and study materials for anyone to access, NPTEL provides online access to five streams of study in engineering – civil, computer science, electronics & communication, electrical, and mechanical. These are made available in collaboration with IISc, Bangalore.
Prof Ananth said there was a “broad overlap” between courses developed by them and some of the 1,8000 courses now available on OCW at ocw.mit.edu.
“Our NPTEL courses were developed taking a cue from Anna University, Vishweshwaraya Technical University, and Jawaharlal Nehru Technical University in Andhra Pradesh. We took all the syllabuses together and modified and converted them into 120 courses after months of discussion and hard work. When MIT approached us, we decided not to mix up both, as it would only confuse our students. Our courses are for students across India, especially those in the rural areas, and they might not be similar to any course taught by MIT,” said Prof Ananth. The HRD Ministry invested Rs 20 crore for the first phase of the NPTEL project. In the second phase, the IITs plan to develop 500 more courses, including some at postgraduate level.
