At Google we are extremely happy to partner with the Ministry of HRD’s NPTEL project. Under NPTEL, some of the best professors in India are offering Free Online Courses that can be taken by any student. These courses are offered using Course Builder - an open-source online courses platform released by Google. We hope that with this initiative, any student anywhere will be able to access high-quality educational material and also earn a certificate after passing the exam.
Currently, there are 47 courses open for enrollment on the NPTEL Online Courses site, covering a variety of subjects like Computer Science, Civil Engineering, Social Sciences, Management, Mathematics and Basic Sciences. These courses are being offered by faculty from IIT Madras, IIT Kanpur, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Bombay, Chennai Mathematical Institute and the Indian Council of Medical Research.
To see the courses and enroll for them, please visit: http://onlinecourses.nptel.ac.in
The online courses consist of video lectures, reading material, quizzes and assignments just like a regular university course. The courses are available in three different durations - 10-hour, 20-hour and 40-hour - based on the length of the lecture material. Online discussion forums are available with each course to answer students’ questions.
Here is a video from NPTEL to introduce the Online Courses program:
A student can take the free online course and later write a formal certification exam (after paying a nominal exam fee). If the student passes the certification exam, she/he will get a certificate from the institute whose faculty offered the online course.
The NPTEL online courses program has been active since January 2014 and over the last two years has offered more than 90 online courses totalling close to 400,000 enrollments.
Posted by Ashwani Sharma, Country Head, University Relations, Google