There are two committees, the National Programme Committee (NPC) headed by the Joint Secretary, Higher Education, MHRD and the Programme Implementation Committee (PIC), headed by Professor M. S. Ananth, Director IIT Madras and Professor in Chemical Engineering.

The NPC oversees implementation of the programme and offers policy guidelines and financial structure. Some of the NPC members are also members of the PIC. The PIC enables the smooth functioning of the project in several phases and takes care of content creation and technology implementation. Members of the PIC meet periodically (about once every three months) to study the progress and issues related to coursework development.

In each IIT/IISc faculty are nominated as TEL coordinators to interact with their colleagues and encourage them to prepare course materials and offer technical and financial assistance using funds sanctioned for that purpose. In addition, two National coordinators, one for web based development and one for video lectures offer assistance and oversee the National programme. Groups are formed for solving specific technology or pedagogy related issues and arrive at general guidelines for faculty preparing course materials. In the first phase of the programme about 350 faculty members in all partner institutions worked together to deliver lecture contents. In the next phase this is likely to increase to well over 1000 faculty. Other Institutions such as NITs and major University faculty are also likely to participate.

Pretty much everything, if they are looking for all-round, well-educated, conceptually sound graduates as opposed to people with specific skill set. Even in the latter case, NPTEL has something to offer for each skill set. Industry can adapt one or more courses on a specific subject to train student population and offer them better financial rewards and career opportunities.

Through NPTEL, a part of the IIT training, flavour and the rigour with which they are given is made available to teachers and student community at large. Therefore, IT and core engineering industries can join hands to do the following:

• Design comprehensive tests and assignments as well as student assessment online in related, engineering- based course contents in most branches so that the student skill sets are improved.
  
  
• Sponsor local teams with the NPTEL faculty for training teachers and students to think on analytic methods of study as opposed to mere rote learning which the current University examination system seems to promote.
  
  
• Design parameters for effective learning of any given subject and offer expert training to colleges to ensure that students do this in addition to their University examinations. Reward mechanism for students can be created.
  
  
• Contribute to the process of creation of contents in several new courses by faculty in IIT/IISc and create courses which are not part of the AICTE curricula but which would address the short and long term training requirements of industries. This would enable better interaction and understanding of mutual requirements of academia and industry.
  
  

The value addition can be enormous if right partnerships are formed between industry and academia.

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 136 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 content generation is spread across all eight institutions. The video content is available in MPEG-4,flv,3gp formats. 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,

Course contents will be useful for teacher training and through them improve the quality of students. In addition, the course materials (both web and video) are freely accessible by everyone independent of their geographic location. These courses can be used by professionals for updating their academic background. Open and distance education using NPTEL contents are long term prospects for IITs. The contents will hopefully help evolve criteria for focused learning and a common set of standards for professional education in India through participation by everyone concerned under this platform.

Several mechanisms have been proposed.

• Conduct course specific workshops by bringing the faculty who developed the course with teachers who are likely to use the lecture material. In the future, a few representative students from many user institutions may be invited to participate in these workshops and give their feedback.
  
  
• Conduct workshops in selected regions all over the country so that a large body of students can also participate and learn the process of usage.
  
  
• Create subject index and keyword search for both video and web materials so that students can search for relevant materials across courses through a search engine.
  
  
• Create course-specific bulletins/discussion boards in the web site so that students can ask questions about the course material. Open learning will be supported by permitting answers by interested students and teachers and with occasional moderation of discussions by course developers.
  
  
• Create a course-specific Edupedia (similar to the powerful concept of Wikipedia) with the help of qualified teachers across the country and a digital library relevant to course materials and make them available in the course area.
  
  
• Create course specific FAQ through all of the above.
  
  
• Encourage teachers in various colleges to adapt the materials to prepare localized versions suitable for the examination system of that college.
  
  
• Share the expertise on e-learning, content development, content dissemination with interested Institutions so that they can set up their own e-learning portals.
  
  
• Distribute the NPTEL content-both web and video to any interested institution for its internal use.
  
  
• Set up a video-on-demand facility in IITs and IISc with sufficient exclusive internet bandwidth for making video lectures available in the streaming format. This will help not only the students and teachers but also industry professionals and open learners.
  
  

Yes, you can if you have broadband connectivity and browsers like Firefox, IE 7 onwards, Safari etc. Please go to the website http://nptel.iitm.ac.in

For video courses, go to the course of interest. Under the "download" tab, all the lectures of that course are listed. Every lecture can be downloaded in MP4, FLV or 3GP format. The size of the download is also indicated. Click on the mirror links provided, to start download. Video lectures are also available on http://www.youtube.com/iit , from which also you can download by using any browser add-ons.

For web courses, go to the course of interest. If it is a PDF, then do a "File-> Save as" in the browse menu and save file to your local machine. In case of other formats, mark the section of text required and copy into your local machine. We are working on providing downloads as PDF, for HTML lectures also.

India is a vast country whose engineering student population outnumbers every other country, except possibly China. The objectives in Phase II are to create contents for science and engineering courses in all major disciplines as well as specialized and newly developing interdisciplinary subjects for which there is very little academic expertise in private colleges. In addition, helping colleges through workshops and discussion boards for implementing NPTEL content in their curriculum will be undertaken as a primary and most important activity. This is the most significant difference between open educational resources developed worldwide and NPTEL. IIT/IISc faculty would be encouraged to incorporate feedback from user community in their courses and update them.

It is one of the fundamental goals of the project to bring in all the best teachers in the country under the umbrella of NPTEL and record their lectures/seek their collaboration with IITs/IISc and make their courses available for the community under free and open sources agreement. There is already a move to create open virtual laboratories in the Internet for engineering subjects initiated by IIT Delhi which is extremely important for our country. Another primary objective is to forge strong ties with major academic initiatives worldwide such as MIT OCW, Commonwealth of Learning, British Open University, Australian Open Universities and Digital Library initiatives (to mention a few) and with industry for developing new technological tools for learning and dissemination. The number of things that must be done simultaneously is enormous. IITs and IISc must rise to the challenge of education in India posed by the unprecedented and rapid economic growth and the opportunities it provides for globalizing the pool of scientific and technical talent in the country. Together everyone WILL prosper.