A Critical Study Of NPTEL - WordPress

nferenceon onTechnologyTechnologyfor forEducationEducationA Critical Study of NPTELMrs.Jayanti Ravi1Prof. Haresh Jayantilal Jani21Government of Gujarat2Business Management, Sardar Patel University1chegujarat@gmail.com 2hjjani@gmail.comdirection to the growth and development of knowledge andput in place mechanisms, processes, skills and humanresources projected for future. This, in turn, requires a baseof sound technical education as this leads to thedevelopment of skilled and competent professionals andwork force as well as the teachers and instructors neededfor further developing new professionals. India haswitnessed a huge demand for engineering education andthis has led to the setting up of a very large number ofprivate engineering institutions across the country.The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) haveestablished themselves as premier institutions in technicaleducation across the country and the world (The TimesHigher Education Supplement international rankings of thetop 200 Universities has only two Indian Institutionsincluded in the top 200 ranking- IIT Bombay and kings2009Top200.html). The Institutes of Technology Act, 1961came to define the IITs(http://www.iitb.ac.in/legal/IITsAct.pdf as on 12thMarch, 2011), although the IITs at Bombay, Kanpur,Kharagpur and Madras were established in the 1950s. Overthe years, the Senate of each IIT has given the mandate forgood quality of syllabus for the courses, contact hours,continuous evaluation methodology and examinations.Thus, IITs have developed excellent instructional material(“Engineering Education for Everyone- A DistanceEducation Experiment at IIT, Bombay” IEEE 2008 byKannan M. Moudgalya, Deepak B. Phatak, R. K.Shevgaonkar). The instruction materials coupled with theabsolutely top quality of students who make it to the IITsthrough a highly competitive examination have made theIITs have a very special brand name. The admission to theIITs is through a highly competitive examination called theJEE (Joint Entrance Examination). In April 2008, as manyas 320,000 candidates took the JEE for about 7000 seats,which translates to a dismal 2.2%. So, while there is atremendous need to join the IITs, given their excellentcourseware, faculty quality and infrastructure, there is ahuge unmet need which has, in recent years beenaddressed to some extent by the large number of newengineering colleges across the country. However, most ofthese colleges are plagued by problems of severe facultyshortage and poor quality of teaching staff hired. In fact,the post-graduate programs or Masters programs inengineering are very small and poor to be able to churn outthe required quantity and quality of teachers that thecolleges need. Added to this is the fact that the expansionof the IT sector has led to the huge expansion in the highpaying jobs that both fuel and quench the aspirations ofstudents studying in technical Institutions. With the result,very few of them opt to go for the teaching profession.This is also on account of the status and economic returnsAbstract— Indian economy is growing at a fast pacepresently. Sustaining this growth requires technicallytrained professionals in large number. It requires providingeducation and training to population in increasing number.The technological advancement can be of great help in thisregard. This paper studies and evaluates TechnologyEnhanced learning, with particular reference to NPTEL – aportal dedicated to technical e-content – across eightdifferent Engineering Colleges of India located inGujarat. Based on a comprehensive survey conductedacross the Engineering Colleges with over 850 respondents,this study is a quantitative analysis of the findings andpreferences articulated by students and faculty members.The questions pertain to the use and features of e contentsuch as NPTEL used by students. Questions related tofaculty quality, need for online educational services, content,technologies, pedagogies, research and extension are alsoposed to the sample. The responses of 287 NPTEL users outof the 875 respondents are compared across gender,institution, income level and such other factors. Theresponses are also tested for hypothesis analyses and otheranalysis such as factor analysis etc. The results and findingsof the paper can be of use for further modifications andmodeling of NPTEL for phase II.Keywords-NPTEL, technical education,enhanced learning, virtual universityI.technologyINTRODUCTIONIndian Economy is growing at a vast pace presently. IfIndia is to become a leading knowledge economy in theworld, one of the key factors that needs attention is thequantity and quality of its human resources. In fact,creation of knowledge, adoption of knowledge andbecoming skilled in the assimilation, contextualization andapplication of knowledge are some of the key areas thatneed special thrust in the journey towards being a leadingglobal knowledge economy (World Bank, 2002,Constructing Knowledge Societies: New challenges forTertiary Education). This requires professionals in variousdisciplines corresponding to the different sectors of theeconomy such as scientists, administrators, technologists,teachers, lawyers, policy planers, health professionals,doctors, industrialists, among others. While all theseprofessionals are needed, the importance of technicalprofessionals and technologists is particularly high in aknowledge society, as they play the important role oftransposing the knowledge, discoveries and innovations inthe fields of Science onto their applications across varioussectors of the economy, including the daily lives of people(ibid). These professionals from different fields oftechnology and engineering would be able to pave the wayand create furrows in new, uncharted terrains byundertaking research, working at the cutting edge ofemerging disciplines and fields. They would have to give978-0-7695-4534-9/11 26.00 2011 IEEEDOI 10.1109/T4E.2011.1435

that have traditionally been associated with the teachingprofession. (M. Moudgalya et al, IEEE 2008).II.NATIONAL PROGRAMME ON TECHNOLOGYENHANCED LEARNING (NPTEL)It is estimated that about 160,000 teachers are neededfor engineering education for a student population of abouttwo million. As against this, only about 4,000 teachers aretrained by higher education institutions every year.Further, since the teaching profession is not one of themore attractive career options for students from thesocietal status and economic point of view, a large numberdo not take up teaching.Against all of this, India is fairly ripe in terms ofavailability and deployment of technology for rolling outICT and e learning initiatives on a large scale. Students arealso very familiar with gadgets and ICT equipment andreadily take to internet based content, chat etc. Efforts suchas the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) of Carnegie MellonUniversity and the OpenCourseWare (OCW) effort of theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are efforts inthis direction that are also opening up education.While there is a great deal of similarity between theOpenCourseWare effort of the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology (MIT) and NPTEL, the differences are that thesyllabi and curricula of the targeted client institutions arefactored into the contents. This is generated by seven topIndian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institute ofScience. NPTEL also organizes a series of workshops forteachers and students of the client institutions to createawareness, collect feedback and facilitate the adoption andinternalization of the contents created by NPTEL.NPTEL also provides for course-specific web spacewhich facilitates threaded discussions where students,teachers and other users anywhere in the world canparticipate. While there are 110 video (approximately4500 hours) lecture courses from phase I, it is planned thatabout 500 video lecture courses (with about 20000 hoursof lectures) would be readied at the end of phase II.NPTEL would, perhaps be the largest single repository oftechnical courses in the world in the streaming videoformat.NPTEL is implemented through two committees – theNational Program Committee (NPC) headed by the JointSecretary, Higher Education, Ministry of Human ResourceDevelopment (MHRD) and the Program ImplementationCommittee (PIC), headed by Professor M. S. Ananth,Director IIT Madras. The NPC oversees policy matters andfinancial sanctions. The PIC has members from allIITs/IISc who are NPTEL Coordinators in each IIT/IIScand members from representative user institutions. Itoversees implementation of the program.The details of the Web courses and Video coursesdeveloped so far are given in the table below.TABLE I.The Promotion of NPTEL has been done using manydifferent methods. Posters and brochures have been sent bypost to more than 3,500 institutes across the country.Emails and bulk sms have been sent to the available dataof all principals and placement officers of various collegesacross the country. Team from BodhBridge (a companyincubated in IIT Madras) has visited nearly 350engineering colleges across the country (Maharashtra,West Bengal, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, AndhraPradesh, Kerala, Karnataka, etc.). This has beensupplemented with online competitions and the selectionof student ambassadors across different campuses.Based on information available from NPTEL in theprogress report sent to the Program ImplementationCommittee for the period ending March, 2010, studentsand faculty from 93 Universities across the country and175 Companies of the Private and Public Sector are usingNPTEL data. Here are some statistics on the use ofNPTEL.Figure 1. NPTEL user profileSource for the tables and charts above: NPTEL Officefrom the progress report sent to the ProgramImplementation Committee for Period ending March 2010.III.RESEARCH AGENDAAs explained in the previous sections, NPTEL has beenrecoding video lectures and packaging these for studentsand faculty of colleges outside the IITs. The present studyaddresses whether and to what extent NPTEL been able tofulfill its objectives.The main objectives of the study were: To study the use and rating of NPTEL byengineering students of various Institutions and thedifferences and similarities in preferences andchoices across different income groups, genderand castes. To assess NPTEL in knowledge enrichment andpassing of examination. To know if a standalone Virtual University ispreferred.COURSE DETAILS36