IIT lectures now online
March 12, 2008
Lectures given at India’s premier engineering colleges can now be viewed online for free here. Seven of the Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) along with the Indian Institue of Science, Bangalore have teamed up for the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL).
NPTEL aims to eventually put more than 20,000 hours of video online. When completed, it will dwarf other online-courseware efforts by leading American universities like MIT or Yale.
The videos cover every engineering subject right from a basic first-semester course like Engineering Chemistry I to Database Design. This will be a great resource for students who complain that their lecturers are incompetent/mildly retarded.
It is, no doubt, an admirable effort, but I am disgusted by the fact that the videos have been uploaded onto Youtube. This is a government sponsored project, why cant they afford the bandwidth to host a couple of petabytes of high-quality video? Besides the obvious lowering of video quality (I beleive Youtube compresses video to save bandwidth), it is a shame that that the Indian government had to turn to a foreign corporation to host its own content.
The URL of the NPTEL site is http://www.nptel.iitm.ac.in/home.php
June 17, 2008 at 5:43 pm
this very useful for all student
June 26, 2008 at 10:37 am
actually the effort is wort appriciating. but when i was looking at lectures i couldn’t help but get bored. i am an engineering student and have also watched MIT lectures. MIT lecutres are far far more superior in quality of teaching (as well as quality of vid). and above that MIT lecutres are vids of actual lectures recorded while IIT ones seem to be specially recorded. so inspite of the special effort put in to make the lecutres “better”, the lectures suck! sad but it’s true. my college has better ppl
June 26, 2008 at 2:35 pm
I agree that the lectures are not very good. The professors seem to be just reading out slides. Although MIT professors are usually innovative and interesting the matter being taught is different from what we study.
The main advantage of NPTEL is that the subjects (and syllabus) of the lectures are similar to those in most Indian engineering colleges.
Take a look at the notes as well. They may be useful for students preparing for GATE.