NPTEL is a big hit among students and faculty 

When professor Mangala Sunder Krishnan, who teaches Chemistry at IIT Madras, came up with the idea of a ‘virtual university’ back in 1999, he had in mind a few thousand students viewing videos of classroom lecture recordings. 

And then came the internet. 

It brought in its wake the likes of Google and YouTube. Riding on them, Prof. Krishnan’s idea exploded and has now morphed into India’s biggest ‘massive open online course (MOOC)’ for higher education. 

Welcome to the NPTEL (National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning), a joint effort of seven Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru.

A click of a button can take you into the fairy-tale world of online education—you can pick any of the more than 6,000 courses on subjects as diverse as engineering, AI, languages and law and immerse yourself into 65,000+ hours of video content—absolutely free.  

In 2023, a whopping 5.2 million people availed themselves of these courses—that is nearly 50 times as many as in 2014. A fifth of these 5.2 million sat for the exams that would earn them a certificate, paying a nominal fee of ₹1,000 per person per test.

The uptrend has continued into 2024 too—for the 719 courses offered in the January-April period, 1.5 million have joined.  

If NPTEL were a commercial enterprise, it would be a multi-billion-dollar company. 

Beyond the numbers 

Housed in the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, NPTEL is an initiative of seven Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. It is one of the nine, (the biggest) National Coordinators of the government of India’s Swayam initiative, self-learning platform. It also runs the online, 4-year, BS Degree course in Data Science, offered by IIT Madras. The courses offered, therefore, carry a professional heft.

Access to quality education 

Taking quality education to nooks and crannies of the country has an impact way beyond giving students some extra pedagogic nutrition to help them handle their courses better. NPTEL has helped faculty as much as students, enabled physically-disabled persons to avail themselves of higher education and fuelled entrepreneurial zeal by giving people tools to start businesses, says Bharati, Head of Operations, NPTEL.  

Many teachers and professors from remote towns and villages have availed themselves of these courses, just to enrich themselves and be able to teach their students better. To give a few examples, S Chandralekha, Assistant Professor, K S Rangasamy College of Technology, Tiruchengode, Tamil Nadu, has completed 39 NPTEL courses; G Chidananda, Associate Professor, Bapuji Institute of Engineering and Technology, Davanagere, Karnataka, has done 23 courses, Shaik Jakeer Hussain, Professor at the Vignans Foundation for Science, Technology and Research, Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, 17. Bharati gave the example of a wheelchair-bound student who suffers from muscular dystrophy, S Prasanth, who has taken up the BS degree course in data science.

And then, there is this example of Pamir Roy, who did his B Tech in mechatronics in Arunachal Pradesh but wanted to learn AI to impart intelligence to robots. He began taking NPTEL courses in 2016-17 and so far, has completed over 30, but importantly, brought his dream of starting a company to fruition. His company, Glet Carafe (meaning ‘money bottle’), headquartered in Bengaluru, which he started in 2021 when he was just 21 years old, provides solutions in software and AI, and has several international clients. “This wouldn’t have been possible without NPTEL,” Roy told businessline. 

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