7

CLOSING THE GAP IN INDIA:
THE NATIONAL PROGRAMME ON
TECHNOLOGY ENHANCED LEARNING

India’s National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) is a large-scale, freely available online educational effort, the product of a partnership between government and higher education with a mandate to serve the nation. Launched with funding from the Indian government and executed by seven of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), NPTEL responds to a specific problem in Indian higher education: the widening gap in quality and resources between top universities like the IITs and the remainder of the country’s engineering education system.¹

NPTEL was conceived in 1999, and funding for the project’s first phase became available in 2003. Phase I—which saw the establishment of the project’s leadership and committee structure, as well as the creation of courseware related to several hundred IIT courses—was completed in June 2007, and the second phase—which will focus more on publicity and evaluation, in addition to creating new content—is proceeding from mid-2009 to 2012.

With over 250 web and video courses and more in development, NPTEL’s extensive offerings are rivaled in scale by few other online courseware programs.² Though each initiative profiled here approaches the task of creating courseware from a unique perspective, this project differs from the others in several key respects, providing interesting points of comparison and contrast with its peers around the world.

Origins and Development of NPTEL

To address the underlying motivations behind the NPTEL project, it is helpful to begin with a brief overview of engineering instruction in India. A series of structural issues have long beset India’s system of engineering education—chief among them the disparities in quality between the country’s relatively tiny elite sector, typified by the IITs, and a much larger group of less prestigious institutions.

Created by an act of Parliament following Indian independence, the IITs were designed to stand for excellence, and much of the country’s teaching and student talent is concentrated in these flagships.³ Professor Anup Ray, the head of IIT Kharagpur’s Center for Educational Technology, referred to the IITs as “the temple of modern India,” and NPTEL’s national video coordinator Kushal Sen said that “the government of India has decided to look after these institutions, so whatever maximum support can be offered to them is. There is a pride in these institutions—among faculty, students, and staff—that gives fuel to running these as well as we can.”⁴ But the same cannot be said of engineering education more broadly; Mangala Sunder Krishnan, NPTEL’s national web coordinator and a professor of chemistry at IIT Madras, emphasized that “Indian engineering education is not uniform, and the gap between the rich and poor institutions is enormous.”⁵

With an acceptance rate of approximately 2–3 percent—lower than that of any U.S. university—IIT admission is highly competitive.⁶ That acceptance rate has only been declining in recent years—a major source of frustration and concern for officials at the IITs and observers of Indian higher education in general, who regret that more of the country’s undergraduates cannot access the IITs’ resources. M. S. Vijay Kumar, a senior associate dean at MIT who has advised the Indian government on higher-education policy, said that a robust tutoring industry has grown up in India to prepare students for the rigorous IIT entrance examinations, and that the process requires the IITs to turn away many qualified students—a circumstance which he called “a tremendous national waste.”⁷

Compared to the IITs, conditions at other institutions, where the majority of Indian higher education takes place, are far less favorable. A 2009 item in The Hindu describing the current state of engineering education in India said that “while several colleges have imposing buildings and state-of-the-art lab equipment to boast about, the appointment of inexperienced and undergraduate degree holders as teachers leaves a yawning gap between the desired level and the current level of expertise available among the faculty.”⁸ A 2008 report similarly declared that “one of the biggest constraints for the development of engineering education in the country is the shortage of quality faculty.”⁹ The IITs have much more favorable teacher-student ratios than the national average, and they employ instructors with PhDs to teach undergraduates, as is the case in American universities.¹⁰ In contrast, many of the private colleges boast very few PhDs on the faculty, and they allow instructors holding masters or even bachelors degrees to conduct most of the teaching.¹¹ Researchers also find cause for concern in the fact that insufficient numbers of PhDs are awarded in India each year, which perpetuates the cycle of a shortage of trained teachers for the next generation of engineers.¹² These factors have led to the fear, articulated by Vijay Kumar to the Chronicle of Higher Education, that for the vast majority of students not admitted to the competitive IITs, “the likelihood of them going to institutions where there are good faculty is slim.”¹³

The options in Indian higher education have also expanded enormously in recent years, eliciting reservations over the quality of these numerous new institutions. A 2006 New York Times article reports that “the number of technical schools in India, including engineering colleges, has more than tripled in the last 10 years.”¹⁴ Most of the growth in Indian higher education has been in the proliferation of privately run colleges that are now responsible for educating the vast majority of Indian engineers.¹⁵ And despite the recent mushrooming of new colleges, the expansion in the higher-education sector continues: the Indian National Knowledge Commission “has recommended the creation of 1,500 universities in India by 2015.”¹⁶ Regulation of these institutions is far from uniform, a problem recognized by India’s current minister of human resource development, Kapil Sibal, who has “reportedly threatened to toss out India’s alphabet soup of higher-education regulators and replace them with a single body.” Sibal, elected in 2009, wants to begin the process of creating a National Council for Higher Education “to oversee India’s myriad higher-education regulatory bodies.”¹⁷

This combination of factors—inadequately prepared faculty, burgeoning numbers of subpar private institutions, poor regulation—has contributed to mounting concern that India will not be able to supply sufficient skilled labor to meet demand for it. The recent building boom in private higher education reflects increasing demand for engineering instruction, but the brick-and-mortar institutions built to do the job are of insufficient quality to make their graduates employable. A New York Times article describing the problem stated that “India is bumping up against an improbable challenge. In a country once regarded as a bottomless well of low-cost, ready-to-work, English-speaking engineers, a shortage looms. India still produces plenty of engineers, nearly 400,000 a year at last count. But their competence has become the issue.”¹⁸ Indeed, a 2005 report by the McKinsey Global Institute found that of the engineers working in India, only 25 percent “would be suitable . . . to work for multinational companies.” The report went on to recommend that “countries seeking to play a role in the emerging global labor market should concentrate on improving the quality of their talent, not just the quantity of educated workers.”¹⁹

Members of the Indian governmental and educational establishment also understand this, lamenting the lack of qualified applicants for highly skilled domestic jobs as well as foreign ones. A month before his 2009 retirement from the post “after an illustrious career,” the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), G. Mahavan Nair, was reported to “bemoan that the country’s higher education system is not up to the mark, churning out graduates only for routine jobs.” Of India’s technical colleges, Nair said that “instead of concentrating on quantity, these institutions should concentrate on quality. . . . I am not happy with the system in the country. The bulk of applicants [who applied for scientific and engineering jobs at the ISRO this year] . . . are not able to get even 50 percent marks on our entrance tests.”²⁰

The motivations that participants ascribe to NPTEL stem directly from these perennial concerns over the state of higher education in India. Krishnan told The Hindu that there are simply not enough resources or trained faculty to accommodate the demand for IIT-level education in a residential format.²¹ And since they can educate so few students in person, Krishnan explained that the IITs wished to find some way to expose all who are interested to aspects of the educational experience they offer.²² As his colleague Anup Ray put it, the IITs found themselves in a position to conclude “If we can’t support more students, how can we reach out? Electronically.”²³

NPTEL seeks to digitally capture IIT courses for the use of students and faculty from the country’s other (non-IIT) science and engineering colleges. The NPTEL courses are “meant to enhance learning of basic science and engineering concepts at the undergraduate level,” and the initiative’s leadership is practical and outcome-oriented in its goals.²⁴ As program director M. S. An-anth said, “the broad aim of the NPTEL project is to facilitate the competitiveness of Indian industry in the global markets through improving the quality and reach of engineering education.”²⁵ In short, the project team—in conjunction with its funding partner, the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), the government body charged with understanding the nation’s sector-wide higher-education needs—designed something it thought the thousands of other engineering colleges in India would find useful.²⁶ Summarizing his colleagues’ intentions for the project, Kushal Sen said that with NPTEL, “the plan is only to help, to give back in some way to our community.”²⁷ Though descriptions of the project acknowledge the many links between NPTEL’s mission and that of MIT OCW, Ananth cited a key difference between the two. In his opinion, the MIT model aims to provide its student users with “the icing on the cake of education”—a supplement to what is already a relatively strong education for U.S. students—while in India NPTEL needs to be “the cake itself.”²⁸

The IITs also had internal motivations for starting a program like NPTEL, but even these relate back to systemic concerns. Krishnan expressed anxiety over what he described as deteriorating overall quality of graduate applicants to the IITs, which he attributes to the declining standards of instruction in most of the higher-education system.²⁹ So R. K. Shevgaonkar, IIT Bombay’s NPTEL institutional coordinator, admitted that in addition to attempting to help students and faculty outside the IITs, “we have a second sort of selfish motive in this”: the hope of increasing the overall quality of applicants for graduate study by providing access to higher-quality materials during their earlier education.³⁰ Ananth agreed, saying that “in the long run it’s selfish, because if the overall quality of education rises, the quality of input to our graduate programs will improve.”³¹ Deepak B. Phatak, a professor of computer science and engineering at IIT Bombay, added an additional rationale for investing in a content creation program like NPTEL: the desire—shared by other project leaders of open-education initiatives based in the developing world—to be considered an active producer of online resources.³² According to Phatak, India now downloads far more from the web than it uploads, and he would like to see the country become a net producer of digital educational content in the next decade.³³

The process of translating these goals into a concrete initiative began with a series of conversations in the 1990s among several Indian universities, an American university, and the Indian government, all of which shared an interest in technology’s potential to improve education in India. The directors of some of the IITs (as well as the MHRD) were intrigued by the possibilities of technology-enhanced learning, and a group of Indian representatives visited Carnegie Mellon University in 1998 to share perspectives on this issue.³⁴ Carnegie Mellon had a long history of institutional involvement with instructional technology, as well as multiple ties to India through personal relationships forged over generations.³⁵ Paul Goodman, a professor of organizational psychology at Carnegie Mellon and the director of its Office of Educational Innovation and Technology, had experience setting up networks for technology-enhanced learning to aid underserved populations in Latin America, and he received a small grant from the Ford Foundation to conduct workshops in India. According to Krishnan, one such workshop was attended by representatives from five IITs, as well as four Indian Institutes of Management.³⁶

The ideas that emerged from that workshop were legion, including a shared digital library model, online PhD programs, a virtual university that could grant degrees, and a project aimed at “developing interactive and electronic resources for core courses for undergraduates.”³⁷ These potential directions coalesced into a single effort, originally called the Virtual Center for Technology Enhanced Learning. The group drafted a memorandum of understanding to work together and submitted a proposal to the Indian government outlining the four possible avenues along which they might proceed. The proposal was revised several times. Its original scope was deemed too broad to pursue in its entirety, and the ministry and IIT representatives decided to take a pragmatic and phased approach to achieving their goals. This decision resulted in a project limited to the online undergraduate course component. On the advice of the ministry, the group of participants was also reconstituted to include each of the seven then-extant IITs and the IISc at Bangalore (the IIMs left the partnership at this time).³⁸

The final proposal “for creating contents for 100 courses as web based supplements and 100 complete video courses, for forty hours of duration per course” was drafted in 1999 and submitted to the MHRD.³⁹ But turnover in the government caused the project to stall at that point, and funding to initiate NPTEL was not available until 2003, when the project received 20.47 crores (204.7 million rupees, or about $4.4 million U.S. dollars) for its first phase, to be used over three years.⁴⁰ The initiative—the name of which was changed to the current National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning—was launched in July 2003 upon receipt of the first round of funding.⁴¹ The next three years were spent on course creation, and the NPTEL website “was launched officially on September 3rd [2006] by the Honourable Minister for HRD, Shri. Arjun Singh in a function held in IIT Madras.”⁴² Phase I was completed in the summer of 2007, and funding for the project’s second phase was formally granted in March 2009.

NPTEL’s Content and Organization

Perhaps the most striking feature of NPTEL is its consortial structure. The IITs, a federation of universities with shared missions but otherwise independent governance, have traditionally contended for the country’s best faculty and students.⁴³ So as Paul Goodman noted, “implementing NPTEL and getting all these other schools to collaborate and to produce is nontrivial. They’re all called IITs, but they’re independent, they compete with each other, and it’s no small thing that they got everyone involved.”⁴⁴ The IITs have worked together to some extent since their founding. They share a source of funding (the MHRD) and have long conducted joint entrance examinations. Various centers and discipline-specific projects, such as an earthquake engineering center based at IIT Kharagpur, also involve multiple campuses. But NPTEL marks the IITs’ deepest and most high-profile collaboration to date, as it requires all parties to build consensus on fundamental curricular issues (Figure 7.1). Professor Ray noted that NPTEL “is the first time that the combined experience and talent of faculty across the IITs has been able to reach out to a much larger population.”⁴⁵

The decision to collaborate arose from the IITs’ determination that, in this case, more could be accomplished together than apart—though both the MHRD and the IITs themselves viewed this partnership as an experiment. Shevgaonkar remarked that designing and running a multi-institutional project “has really been a tremendous task, and [the MHRD] thought we wouldn’t be able to do it because there would be coordination problems.” In his opinion the MHRD’s initial skepticism was evidenced by the fact that the original allocation was “pretty meager.”⁴⁶

NPTEL has a different consortial structure than those attempted by Fathom and AllLearn. Though university partners initiated and developed the concepts for all three efforts, Fathom and AllLearn both created strong central governing structures and hired professional CEOs to run the initiatives. In contrast, NPTEL’s organizational leadership is drawn entirely from the IITs’ faculty and administrative ranks and lacks a central, physical space. Every NPTEL coordinator is a tenured IIT faculty member, as the initiative does not want to burden those still working to earn tenure with extra tasks.⁴⁷ Coordinators receive an honorarium for their administrative efforts, but only after they have devoted three years to NPTEL to ensure their commitment to the organization; according to Krishnan, “the intention should be . . . to contribute rather than to treat this as a position for hire.”⁴⁸

FIGURE 7.1 NPTEL’s landing page (as it appeared on April 29, 2010).

Available at http://nptel.iitm.ac.in/. © 2006-2010 Indian Institute of Technology. All rights reserved.

The program is administered by a tiered system of committees working in a complex hierarchy, resulting in more consensus-driven governance. The bulk of the decision making is accomplished by two committees: the National Programme Committee (NPC), which determines the highest-level policy decisions and coordinates with the ministry on funding issues, and the Programme Implementation Committee (PIC), which makes operational decisions about course content and delivery modes. The initiative is headed by Ananth, who in addition to founding and leading NPTEL is the director (equivalent to a university president) of IIT Madras. The director of each IIT sits on the NPC, and this executive body also includes two national coordinators: Krishnan, a professor at IIT Madras, who oversees the web courses across all the IITs, and Sen, who teaches at IIT Delhi and is his counterpart for video courses. Each participating IIT also selects an institutional coordinator to administer all day-to-day NPTEL activities at that IIT; as a group, these coordinators comprise the PIC.⁴⁹ The PIC meets every two or three months to coordinate efforts and mitigate confusion at the local level, while the NPC, which sets the vision and scope for the overall project, meets less frequently.⁵⁰

NPTEL seeks to build a curriculum in science and engineering, capturing and packaging IIT content for an audience of students and faculty outside the IITs. Content creation is a collaborative effort, with faculty from each institution contributing courses in five major disciplinary areas: civil engineering, computer science and engineering, electrical engineering, electronics and communication engineering, and mechanical engineering. In determining which subject areas to focus on in Phase I, the NPTEL team looked to the subjects most commonly taught at other engineering colleges throughout India and consulted with the government-led All India Council on Technical Education (AICTE) to establish which subjects were most in demand nationwide. After choosing the disciplines “that most institutions would offer,” the NPTEL team set out to create digital versions of all of the courses required for a bachelors degree in those fields.⁵¹ The curricular standards established by the AICTE, as well as syllabi from some of India’s largest public universities, were helpful in ensuring that NPTEL courses covered the rubric and requirements adhered to by most Indian engineering colleges.⁵² Phase II will see the project expand to include a broader range of disciplines, as well as graduate-level courses.

Unlike efforts like MIT OCW or webcast.berkeley, NPTEL does not exactly mirror the curriculum of any one institution, but instead aims to convey a useful and comprehensive curriculum to other institutions. Shevgaonkar said that NPTEL does not intend to eventually capture every course at every IIT, but to create a collection of all the key engineering course materials that the majority of Indian students need.⁵³ Because the content is designed to be useful to students and teachers at the regional colleges, maintaining course quality is a priority for the NPTEL team. To that end, each NPTEL course created by a given faculty member is reviewed by a colleague at a peer institution before it is posted on the web. The peer-review process is intended to minimize mistakes and ensure that the courseware is factually correct and fulfills its curricular objectives.⁵⁴

NPTEL courses take two forms, web and video. The web courses contain faculty bios, syllabi, and descriptions of course objectives. Unlike MIT OCW, whose web-only courses often consist only of handouts or slides that were originally supplements to live lectures, NPTEL web courses have been specifically redesigned to accurately and completely impart course knowledge over the web. Though lacking the interactive features and structured feedback to users offered by Carnegie Mellon’s OLI, many NPTEL web courses verge on the OLI’s level of completeness in the depth and breadth of material covered.

The initial plan for NPTEL was to focus only on web courses, but in early discussions the MHRD suggested that video would be another important direction for the project. Video courses are recorded in studios housed at each partner institution. In contrast to MIT OCW’s video content, Open Yale Courses (OYC), and webcast .berkeley, which capture professors delivering their lectures to actual students, NPTEL courses are often recorded without an audience. By bringing professors into the recording studio to deliver their lectures exclusively for NPTEL, the video team can ask that they look directly into the camera when they speak (Figure 7.2). Shevgaonkar said that when delivering electronic content, “it is very important to establish that link, or the audience loses interest very quickly,” and he thinks this is best achieved by creating a somewhat different lecture experience for the home user than that of the IIT students hearing the material in a lecture hall.⁵⁵ This approach to video differs most markedly from that of OYC, which seeks to provide a window into the Yale classroom experience and therefore values the naturalism of “hidden camera”–style lecture videos. A goal of NPTEL is to impart some of “the IIT training, flavour and rigour” to those who could not otherwise receive an IIT-caliber education.⁵⁶ For NPTEL, that goal is accomplished by simply delivering the lecture content, while OYC wants to capture the ambience of the lecture hall along with the information.

The scope of the NPTEL effort is significant, resulting in a great deal of content so far and more to come. Between the site’s launch in 2006 and the completion of Phase I in the summer of 2007, NPTEL produced 239 courses, 110 of which have full video.⁵⁷ The project plan outlines the goal of creating 600 more engineering and science courses in Phase II, 400 of which will be video courses (containing about 16,000 hours of lectures).⁵⁸ Additional content creation is envisioned beyond the completion of Phase II, leading to the claim that “when this is completed, this will be the largest video repository of technical lecture-courses in the world in the streaming video format.”⁵⁹ In addition to making the courses available via its website, NPTEL airs the video content on the Indian public television station Eklavya and offers it through an NPTEL YouTube channel. To enhance local accessibility in parts of India with low connectivity or limited bandwidth, NPTEL also distributes video content on hard drives and DVDs for a small fee (to cover its costs).

FIGURE 7.2 Still from NPTEL lecture video, “Artificial Intelligence,” session 1, with Professor Anupam Basu of IIT Kharagpur (© 2004).

Available at http://nptel.iitm.ac.in/video.php?courseId=1080. Permission provided courtesy of Indian Institute of Technology. © 2006–2010 Indian Institute of Technology. All rights reserved.

In parallel to the project management committees, five discipline coordinators drawn from across the IITs work to ensure comprehensiveness, set pedagogical standards for each discipline, and identify faculty as potential instructors for NPTEL.⁶⁰ The discipline coordinators are themselves IIT professors, and in consort with the institutional coordinators they decide which faculty in their subject areas should create which courses. Covering the necessary courses in each discipline is the primary concern, but Usha Nagarajan, IIT Madras’s web studio project manager, said the coordinators also highlight the various IITs’ strengths in particular subfields and consider individual professors’ skills as lecturers.⁶¹

According to Sen, almost 350 faculty are involved in creating content for NPTEL, so “it’s not easy to decide who will do what,” and coordinating the faculty effort has been a successful “experiment in cooperation.”⁶² Ananth said that “we’ve tried to keep the redundancy to a minimum because we want to cover as much ground as possible”; about half the NPTEL courses have been created by two professors working together, occasionally from different institutions.⁶³ Several interviewees recalled early difficulties in convincing faculty to participate, but Krishnan reported that faculty have since warmed to the idea and have begun to approach the NPTEL staff about contributing courses. Faculty receive an honorarium of $2,000-$5,000—a policy that the ministry at first resisted. But Krishnan explained that the IITs “wanted an ‘in principle’ recognition that those who do extra work should be paid for it.”⁶⁴

At each IIT, NPTEL funds a staff of temporary employees to liaise with the faculty and see to the technical aspects of producing courses at each campus. These project administrators are instructed to collect whatever materials faculty have available and create the courses from those materials, helping with design and simple animations for web courses and with studio recording and editing for video lectures.⁶⁵ Krishnan recounted that “in the first phase we hired one project associate for every two courses, and they work[ed] with those faculty. We would never ask faculty to do something they don’t want to do—we provide the technology and the human resources.” He said that in Phase I 20-30 people at IIT Madras worked on NPTEL at any one time.

NPTEL materials differ from their American counterparts in that they do not carry open licenses; the content is currently copyright protected, with the copyrights jointly owned by the faculty creators and the MHRD.⁶⁶ The NPTEL team had initial reservations about Creative Commons and is currently debating its adoption for the Phase II material. According to Krishnan, they entered into the project without much clarity regarding content licenses: “We are moving toward Creative Commons, but we’re not there yet.”⁶⁷ Deepak B. Phatak, of IIT Bombay, started Creative Commons India three years ago and thinks that NPTEL should move in that direction. Creative Commons licenses allow end users to modify content and republish adapted versions, a feature that Phatak sees as key to the materials’ utility. But he realizes that there is work to be done in convincing the IIT faculty of the virtues of allowing for remix and reuse, as they still harbor concerns that the integrity of their content may be compromised.⁶⁸ The site’s FAQ currently states that “barring a few courses, the rest of the materials are likely to be distributed under a Creative Commons license in the future.”⁶⁹

Impact of NPTEL

NPTEL’s target audience—students and faculty at other institutions of higher education in India—is built into the very premise of the project. Shevgaonkar said that the “usage goal was that we would like to make content available to the largest number of students and engineering aspirants in the country as possible,” creating a situation in which “no one would be deprived because they didn’t have access to good teachers—we have the teachers.”⁷⁰ Though the student users are paramount in NPTEL’s envisioned audience, the project’s teacher training possibilities were also clear from the beginning. In India, “we have a very small ratio of good to average teachers,” Krishnan said, “so we thought we would also use these materials to train” teachers at institutions of lower quality than the IITs.⁷¹

Although the vast majority of NPTEL’s usage comes from India, the next largest group of users is from the United States. Sen noted that “it was basically designed for India . . . so we weren’t sure how useful it would be to students outside the country,” and Krishnan emphasized that “if people use NPTEL contents outside of India, that’s a by-product. That’s not our motive. Our motive is to solve a local problem.”⁷² NPTEL’s curricular design attests to this local interest. In the process of consulting with the AICTE to determine which disciplines were most in demand at the national level, it came to the NPTEL team’s attention that some concepts considered remedial at the IITs, and thus not covered in their own classes, were part of the standard curriculum at other colleges. The faculty then added modules with more basic content to the NPTEL versions of their courses in order to make them as useful as possible outside the IITs.⁷³

The NPTEL team’s ultimate goal is to see the resource used as a study or teacher training aid by students and faculty from all of India’s technical colleges. But as Krishnan said, “we know that could not happen in five years.”⁷⁴ Many involved with NPTEL are not yet satisfied with the level of usage their site has received, though it gets 100,000 visits per month and the NPTEL YouTube channel received over 1.6 million views in its first two years.⁷⁵ When the website was launched, free registration was required. According to the project document, “within ten months of its launch date in September [2006], more than 160,000 users have registered and more than 580,000 visits have been recorded” with users coming from “140 countries or more.” But the practice of registering users and requiring passwords was ended in November 2007 to encourage greater usage.⁷⁶ Describing the site’s traffic to date, Shevgaonkar said, “I wouldn’t say it is meager, but it certainly could be better.” Based on his conversations with colleagues at other institutions, he thinks that faculty at about one in three Indian colleges have heard of NPTEL, but he cautions that that is not a scientific figure.⁷⁷ As Krishnan described it, “the usage is less than what we thought, but there is an increase almost every month.”⁷⁸

Though awareness of the initiative is not as widespread as the NPTEL team might like, the site has attracted its current users with minimal outreach and very little marketing. According to Krishnan, the team has sent out mailings on NPTEL to about 2,200 Indian colleges on two different occasions, and Ananth has spoken about it at some international meetings. “We do some talking [on behalf of NPTEL], but probably not as much as we should.”⁷⁹ Ananth and Kannan M. Moudgalya, a professor of chemical engineering at IIT Bombay who has worked on NPTEL, remarked that the initiative was not interested in drawing attention to itself in Phase I, though all involved realize that more outreach will be necessary in the future to increase awareness of the project.⁸⁰ Krishnan added that “people are slowly becoming aware of it, but people are always asking ‘how come I didn’t know this existed?’” He said NPTEL would like to increase its marketing efforts, but it has no designated staff for those activities. “Advertisement is not a strength of the IITs—they sell themselves. [NPTEL] is run by academics,” who are not used to having to think about marketing and may not be well suited to the task.⁸¹ In Phase II, NPTEL’s leadership plans to conduct a series of workshops at private colleges to encourage faculty and student adoption and to gather feedback.

Within India, NPTEL has received a fair amount of press attention, and the coverage has positively reinforced the initiative’s value propositions. One article begins: “Didn’t make it into IIT this year? Don’t worry, you can still get an IIT education on YouTube.”⁸² To quote another, “with this, every student in the country can virtually become a ‘product’ of acclaimed institutions like IITs or IISc!”⁸³ And a 2006 item in the Hindustan Times called NPTEL “a unique nation-building exercise.”⁸⁴ The tone of such articles is strikingly similar to the coverage of MIT OCW’s launch, with headlines like “Free Higher Education: MIT’s OpenCourseWare Plan Fires the First Real Shot” and “All the World’s an MIT Campus.”⁸⁵

Reflecting on the project in the spring of 2009, many interviewees claimed it was too soon to properly assess the impact of NPTEL, as courses have only been available on the site for a few years.⁸⁶ Discussing NPTEL’s impact to date, Krishnan suggested “it is difficult to assess. It’s all euphoria now, everyone’s happy to see that the materials are free, but it will take three or four years to see what it will really do.”⁸⁷ From Goodman’s perspective, “NPTEL is achieving what it was supposed to do, and the fact that it received good government funding for another five years is not a bad metric for evaluation.”⁸⁸

In Phase I, the ministry did not fund or require evaluation, and as a result Sen said that “so far we have not assessed—in formal terms—the impact. We will do it in Phase II; we will take that up.”⁸⁹ But some preliminary attempts were made at evaluating usage in non-labor-intensive ways. Though the requirement that users register was abandoned after a few months, that policy provided NPTEL with some information about its demographics. According to Krishnan, of the first half million visitors to the site, 40 percent self-identified as students, 10 percent as teachers, and 50 percent as working professionals.⁹⁰ NPTEL has since subscribed to Google Analytics to keep track of basic site statistics; beyond that, evaluation of the site’s efficacy does not seem be much of a personal priority for Ananth, the project’s leader. He said that in his opinion, it is misguided for educational initiatives to make evaluation more important than conveying information, “but others say I’m very old-fashioned.”⁹¹

Krishnan takes a different view: “This country is spending a lot of money to help us fund these courses, so we owe the responsibility to the government that what comes out of it is actually useful to its citizens.”⁹² To that end, NPTEL is considering possible methods for more robust evaluation in Phase II, and team members also intend to make research trips to the colleges to gather qualitative evidence of on-the-ground usage. Shevgaonkar said that in the near future, those involved with NPTEL will need to supplement their enthusiasm with objective assessment: “There was a honeymoon period, but now that’s over.”⁹³

Interviewees mentioned several possible impacts NPTEL may have had on the IITs themselves, but the lack of consensus on this point indicates that internal impacts were not a substantial part of the initiative’s mission or self-conception. IIT Bombay Director Devang V. Khakhar reported that in his understanding, NPTEL was “different [from other educational technology projects] because it was prepared as a package to be given to somebody outside . . . it wasn’t something we did for our own students.”⁹⁴ The coordinators are not sure if IIT students make significant use of the resource, and several claimed that the project’s real internal contribution has simply been to make IIT faculty aware of the role they can play in the broader community.⁹⁵ Little is known of the initiative outside India, so it has not yet been of great benefit to the IITs internationally in terms of public relations.⁹⁶ Domestically, Moudgalya stressed that publicity is not a priority for the IITs. While some peer initiatives have considered the roles that online courses could play in attracting prospective students, he noted that the IITs are flooded with more applicants than they could ever accept and have no local competition but each other: “We’re a totally sellers’ market.”⁹⁷ Any strategic value that NPTEL might have to the IITs is tied to the project’s and the ministry’s overall goal of improving Indian higher education. As Khakhar put it, “I think it’s a strategic plan for the nation more than just for one Institute.”⁹⁸

NPTEL and Sustainability

The MHRD funded NPTEL Phase I from 2003 through June 2007, at which point NPTEL submitted a final report to the ministry describing Phase I’s achievements and requesting funding for Phase II. At that time, the ministry was in a state of flux and could not immediately grant additional funds.⁹⁹ The MHRD offered strong indications that more funding would be forthcoming, as it planned to feature NPTEL prominently in the portion of the National Mission devoted to higher education through information and communication technology. But it asked that the IITs chip in some of their own funds to keep the project going in the meantime.¹⁰⁰ In March 2009, the funding for Phase II was approved. Phase II will be funded through 2012, with a budget closer to $20 million, compared to the first phase’s budget of under $5 million.¹⁰¹ The fourfold increase in the budget corresponds to a threefold increase in the amount of content to be created: 239 courses were created in Phase I, and 600 more are slated for Phase II.¹⁰²

Now that the Phase II grant has been awarded, all interviewees seemed confident that the government’s interest in the project will remain steady in the near future. “It was quite clear to the ministry that NPTEL would be its star project,” Krishnan said, and Vijay Kumar told the Chronicle of Higher Education that it is in the government’s interest to support such projects because “it’s cheaper than building new universities and hiring more professors.”¹⁰³

Several interviewees expressed interest in eventually persuading Indian businesses to take on some of the financial burden of NPTEL, as industry will presumably benefit from receiving better-educated entry-level engineers and information technology professionals. Ananth agreed that in the future it would be wise to diversify the sources of funding for the project, and he believes he can easily convince Indian industry to contribute about 30 percent of its budget once the Phase II content has been created.¹⁰⁴ Krishnan agreed that by the end of Phase II, NPTEL might contemplate the possibility of becoming more self-sustaining, but he still thinks the government will always be an important source of educational support in India. He ventured that in a country where much of the adult population is illiterate, only government will be interested in and capable of addressing systemic educational problems of that magnitude.¹⁰⁵

As the project progresses into its second phase, NPTEL’s leadership wants to improve existing content in addition to creating hundreds of new courses. This will involve adding supplemental components, such as assignments and solutions, to existing courses, as well as reviewing the web courses created in Phase I to ensure that all are complete.¹⁰⁶ The NPTEL team also wants to experiment with added functionality by making the courses more interactive. Ananth recalled that the learning potential of pedagogically sophisticated web courses had been part of the IITs’ initial discussions and workshops with Carnegie Mellon, but that it was important to him to begin simply by producing content: “I [was] most concerned with reach first.”¹⁰⁷

Currently the NPTEL courses have some rudimentary and little-used discussion forums, but there are plans for enhanced interactivity in Phase II.¹⁰⁸ Krishnan said that a goal of Phase I was “also to learn how to create content for students beyond our own.” Phase II has new programs “to really provide an education rather than a content-building exercise—which is much more difficult to do.” This “educational process” will include laboratory simulations, as well as the creation of user communities built around the content through discussions with peers and question-and-answer sessions with moderators.¹⁰⁹ NPTEL’s proposals for more dynamic elements seem to much more closely resemble the Fathom and AllLearn models of interactivity than the asynchronous learning environments, full of embedded assessment tools, created by the OLI. Krishnan admitted that the “OLI is much more sophisticated” than what NPTEL aims to achieve. He went on to say that “it would be nice if we could design something similar, but to do it at the level of OLI would require an enormous shifting of our priorities” away from adding more courses to focus exclusively on developing and implementing technology solutions. “To do something like that for . . . hundreds of courses in India would be an enormous challenge.”¹¹⁰

Although generating increased and diversified content remains NPTEL’s immediate goal, the ultimate vision for this course material is that it might one day support the first “virtual IIT.” The desire to found an IIT-caliber institution entirely online dates back to the original planning discussions in 1999; it is mentioned as the project’s ultimate objective in its first press release.¹¹¹ But Ray said that at the time, the government was willing to fund only content creation (i.e., NPTEL) because “a virtual university in India in 1999 was not very palatable to them.” So the IITs were told to prove themselves capable of producing content first, with the understanding that NPTEL might provide a foundation of content for such an institution in the future.¹¹² To date, NPTEL’s leadership has not considered offering credit or certification to users due to concerns about maintaining the IITs’ academic standards. As Shevgaonkar puts it, “our entrance is very tight, we don’t want to just give a certificate or a degree to anybody.”¹¹³ But several members of the project team agreed that credit is an issue that NPTEL must address in the future, and Ananth sees the proposed virtual IIT as a means of eventually credentialing more students than the brick-and-mortar IITs are able to support.¹¹⁴

NPTEL’s ambitions for its next phase of development are considerable, and the project’s leadership speculates that if it is to scale up, the IITs will need some help. In its current form, Krishnan described NPTEL as “a limited exercise—it is eight institutions providing something that could be a solution to over 2,000 colleges. We can’t forever say to the teachers in [the colleges] ‘here, we’ll make this and you read it’—so in the second phase of NPTEL, we are looking to have some of these teachers as partners.”¹¹⁵ Two or three courses from Phase I were created in conjunction with professors from outside the IITs, but Krishnan said that outreach to faculty at these other institutions “didn’t happen as much as we wanted in the beginning.” Yet IIT faculty members know of many colleagues who would be strong potential contributors to NPTEL, and they plan to bring them in during Phase II. He said that involving faculty from the initiative’s target demographic—those who teach and learn at Indian colleges outside the IIT system—may expand NPTEL’s adoption, because “some teachers don’t want to use something made by someone else.”¹¹⁶

Some 350 professors contributed content to NPTEL in its initial phase, but “in the next phase this is likely to increase to well over 1,000 faculty.”¹¹⁷ Diversifying the sources of NPTEL content has implications for the initiative’s sustainability, as it would spread out the burden of content creation beyond the IITs, and expanding the project to include a wider range of faculty contributions would also reinforce its national character. In Sen’s words, “We want other people to feel like they are a part of it. . . . No egos. Our aim is to make everyone rise.”¹¹⁸

 

¹ When the NPTEL project was founded, there were seven IITs; eight new ones were established in 2008. Just one testament to the prestige of these institutions is the fact that two of them (IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi) were the only Indian universities to be included in the 2009 Times Higher Education Supplement international rankings of the top 200 universities (“Top 200 World Universities,” Times Higher Education Supplement 2009, online edition, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/Rankings2009-Top200.html).

² Dan Colman, director and associate dean of Stanford’s continuing studies program, wrote on his blog OpenCulture that, with the launch of NPTEL, “suddenly MIT is not the only tech powerhouse getting into the business of providing free educational resources” (Colman, Dan, “India’s Answer to MIT Presents Free Courses on YouTube (in English),” May 27, 2008, http://www.openculture.com/2008/05/indias_answer_to_mit_presents_free_
courses_on_youtube_in_english.html, cited in Bonk, Curtis J., The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009, 177).

³ The official act defining the IITs is dated 1961, though the earliest IITs (Kharagpur, Bombay, Kanpur, and Madras) were established in the 1950s (“The Institutes of Technology Act, 1961,” http://www.iitb.ac.in/legal/IITsAct.pdf).

⁴ Interviews with Anup Ray, 4/3/09, and Kushal Sen, 4/6/09.

⁵ Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 2/23/09.

⁶ In April 2008 “a record 320,000 applicants took the entrance exam for fewer than 7,000 seats,” about a 2 percent acceptance rate (Neelakantan, Shailaja, “Elite Technology Institutes in India Double Their Tuition,” Chronicle of Higher Education, online edition, May 16, 2008).

⁷ Interview with M. S. Vijay Kumar, 12/11/08.

⁸ Rangarajan, A. D., “NPTEL Streaming Knowledge to All,” The Hindu, English edition, online edition, March 9, 2009.

⁹ Banerjee, Rangan, and Vinayak P. Muley, “Engineering Education in India,” sponsored by the Observer Research Foundation, December 16, 2008. Even the IITs are unable to fill over a quarter of their available faculty slots due to a shortage of qualified candidates (Neelakantan, Shailaja, “India Plans New Elite Institutes,” Chronicle of Higher Education, online edition, September 7, 2007).

¹⁰ Krishnan said that the average teacher/student ratio in Indian higher education is 1:200 or 1:250, while at the IITs it is significantly lower (interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 3/31/09).

¹¹ “Almost all engineering colleges and . . . universities face an acute shortage of teachers with adequate subject knowledge and teaching experience. The Master’s programmes in engineering are too weak and small in number to meet the demand for qualified teachers. Most of the persons employed as teachers for the Bachelor’s programmes are young B. Tech. or MCA graduates who themselves graduated from the same indifferent engineering education system” (Mahadevan, G., “A Seamless Hi-Tech Learning System,” The Hindu, English edition, online edition, June 8, 2009).

¹² “India awarded about 2.3 lakhs [230,000] engineering degrees, 20,000 engineering masters degrees and about 1,000 engineering Ph.D.s in 2006. India’s doctorate degrees are less than 1% of graduate engineering degrees,” whereas in the United States, doctoral degrees make up 10 percent of all engineering degrees awarded (Banerjee and Muley, “Engineering Education in India,” i).

¹³ Aujla, Simmi, and Ben Terris, “Around the World, Varied Approaches to Open Online Learning,” Chronicle of Higher Education, online edition, October 11, 2009.

¹⁴ Sengupta, Somini, “Skills Gap Hurts Technology Boom in India,” New York Times, online edition, October 17, 2006.

¹⁵ “Higher education has seen an impressive growth since India’s independence in 1947. Overall, the number of universities has increased from 25 in 1950 to 371 in 2006, [and] the number of colleges has increased from 700 to 18,064. . . . Growth of financially independent private institutions has been the most significant development over the past few decades” (Agarwal, Pawan, Indian Higher Education: Envisioning the Future, New Delhi: Sage India, 2009, 17, 22). “About 75% of the engineering graduates are taught at the private engineering colleges” (Banerjee and Muley, “Engineering Education in India”).

¹⁶ Vaidhyasubramaniam, S., “Funding Higher Education,” Hindu Business Line, online edition, September 30, 2009.

¹⁷ Neelakatan, Shailaja, and Karin Fischer, “News Analysis: What Recent Moves in India Could Mean for American Higher Education,” Chronicle of Higher Education, online edition, June 17, 2009.

¹⁸ Sengupta, Somini, “Skills Gap Hurts Technology Boom in India,” New York Times, online edition, October 17, 2006. The article goes on to say that “with the number of technology jobs expected to nearly double to 1.7 million in the next four years, companies are scrambling to fi nd fresh engineering talent and to upgrade the schools that produce it.”

¹⁹ McKinsey Global Institute, “The Emerging Global Labor Market: Part II—The Supply of Offshore Talent in Services,” June 2005, http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/emerginggloballabormarket/part2/index.asp, 7, 13.

²⁰ “Nair Set to Retire: Bemoans Poor Quality of Higher Education,” Press Trust of India/Bangalore, October 16, 2009, Business Standard, http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/nair-set-to-retire-bemoans-poor-quality-higher-education/76136/on.

²¹ Jebaraj, Priscilla, “IIT Online Learning Courses Gaining Momentum,” The Hindu, English edition, online edition, July 28, 2008.

²² Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 4/1/09.

²³ Interview with Anup Ray, 4/3/09.

²⁴ Naha, Abdul Latheef, “NPTEL Set for Second Phase,” The Hindu, English edition, online edition, November 27, 2007.

²⁵ National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning, “Project Document: July 2003–June 2006,” July 2006, http://nptel.iitk.ac.in/NPTELBooklet.pdf, 5.

²⁶ Interview with M. S. Ananth, 4/2/09.

²⁷ Interview with Kushal Sen, 4/6/09.

²⁸ Interview with M. S. Ananth, 4/2/09. In Ananth’s view, MIT OCW could be effective for users who are already educated, but in India, colleges are so lacking in qualified teachers that they need the basics, not enrichment; NPTEL is perhaps the only means by which many Indian students could be exposed to faculty with PhDs. While some technology-enhanced educational opportunity “is really a necessity in India, it’s not a matter of enhancement in the quality of education, it’s just providing the education. There’s a real thirst for learning, and I think that’s characteristic of developing countries.”

²⁹ Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 2/23/09. According to Krishnan, the construction of new private colleges has increased the pool of college graduates eligible to apply to graduate school, but given the questionable quality of those undergraduate institutions, the overall quality of graduates has declined even as their numbers have increased.

³⁰ Interview with R. K. Shevgaonkar, 4/9/09.

³¹ Interview with M. S. Ananth, 4/2/09. Ananth acknowledged that the current IIT undergraduates might also benefit from NPTEL content as a study tool, though not all interviewees cited that kind of internal use as an initial motivation for the project.

³² Catherine Ngugi, the director of the Hewlett-funded OER Africa initiative, has similarly expressed the importance of Africa becoming a producer of content for its own population and for the world at large, rather than merely consuming Western education (Ngugi, Catherine, keynote address, 2009 Open Education Conference, Vancouver, August 12, 2009).

³³ Interview with Deepak B. Phatak, 4/8/09.

³⁴ Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 2/23/09; Vencatesan, Jayshree, “Recent Initiatives in Distance Education,” Current Science 91, no. 7 (October 10, 2006), 891-93.

³⁵ Interview with Paul Goodman, 3/19/09.

³⁶ Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 4/1/09. Carnegie Mellon’s discussions with the IITs that resulted in NPTEL predated the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) by several years; the two are unconnected, and Goodman has not been involved with the OLI project.

³⁷ National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning, “Project Document: July 2003–June 2006,” 5.

³⁸ Interview with Paul Goodman, 3/19/09. Carnegie Mellon ceased official involvement at that point and continued to play only an informal advisory role in the project. As Goodman said of NPTEL, “It’s their project, and they run it, but they also acknowledge that it came about because of our relationship.”

³⁹ National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning, “Frequently Asked Questions,” http://nptel.iitm.ac.in/faq.php.

⁴⁰ National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning, “Project Document: July 2003–June 2006,” 5.

⁴¹ Special Correspondent, “Quota Bill Will Not Face Opposition,” The Hindu, English edition, online edition, September 4, 2006.

⁴² National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning, “Project Document: July 2003–June 2006,” 32.

⁴³ Kushal Sen explained that a pan-IIT counsel works with the MHRD to set policy at the highest level, but “after that these institutions are autonomous bodies: they give their own degrees, they decide what they want to teach, they decide which ways they want to grow.” Each IIT has a great deal of curricular freedom (interview with Kushal Sen, 4/6/09).

⁴⁴ Interview with Paul Goodman, 3/19/09.

⁴⁵ Interview with Anup Ray, 4/3/09.

⁴⁶ Interview with R. K. Shevgaonkar, 4/9/09.

⁴⁷ Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 3/31/09. Programs like MIT OCW and the OLI are run by full-time professionals who are not professors, and Ray believes that approach is preferable to NPTEL’s reliance on tenured faculty to do the bulk of the work. In his opinion, the project coordinators should be outsiders, because running the effort is such a strain on professors’ time (interview with Anup Ray, 4/3/09). Ananth said that he had originally hoped that someone from the business world would administer NPTEL, because that skill set would be useful for project management. When the creation of content for NPTEL’s Phase II is complete, he wants to revisit the idea of having industry operate the program (interview with M. S. Ananth, 4/2/09).

⁴⁸ Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 3/31/09.

⁴⁹ At IIT Madras and IIT Delhi, Krishnan and Sen, respectively, serve this role in addition to their system-wide responsibilities, but each of the other IITs selects an individual for this specific task.

⁵⁰ National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning, “Frequently Asked Questions.” The location of the meetings shifts from one IIT to the next to ensure that each director has a chance to host and the travel burden is equitably distributed (interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 4/1/09).

⁵¹ Ibid.

⁵² Interview with M. S. Ananth, 4/2/09.

⁵³ Interview with R. K. Shevgaonkar, 4/9/09.

⁵⁴ Interview with Anup Ray, 4/3/09. He explained that reviewers are paid for their efforts. Fathom, another initiative that collected content created at multiple independent institutions, also instituted a review method, although one carried out by a central board (headed by then–Columbia Provost Jonathan Cole) as opposed to the distributed peer-review process deployed by NPTEL.

⁵⁵ Interview with R. K. Shevgaonkar, 4/9/09. In some cases, students are brought into the studio so that the professor delivering the lecture has someone to talk to, but many professors prefer to record alone.

⁵⁶ National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning, “Frequently Asked Questions.”

⁵⁷ Ibid. Each video course contains at least 40 hours of video.

⁵⁸ Ananth, M. S., and Mangala Sunder Krishnan, “Proposal under the National Mission on Education through ICT: NPTEL Phases II and III, July 2007 to June 2012,” submitted to Higher Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, New Delhi, 2.

⁵⁹ National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning, “Frequently Asked Questions.” Emphasis in original.

⁶⁰ The PIC chose the five discipline coordinators at its first meeting in July 2003.

⁶¹ Interview with Usha Nagarajan, 4/1/09. She explained that IIT professors are rated by their students at the end of each semester, and the highest-rated professors are chosen for NPTEL first.

⁶² Interview with Kushal Sen, 4/6/09.

⁶³ Interviews with M. S. Ananth, 4/2/09, and Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 3/31/09.

⁶⁴ Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 3/31/09.

⁶⁵ Ibid.

⁶⁶ Interviews with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 4/1/09, and Anup Ray, 4/3/09.

⁶⁷ Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 4/1/09.

⁶⁸ Interview with Deepak B. Phatak, 4/8/09.

⁶⁹ National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning, “Frequently Asked Questions.”

⁷⁰ Interview with R. K. Shevgaonkar, 4/9/09.

⁷¹ Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 2/23/09.

⁷² Interviews with Kushal Sen, 4/6/09, and Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 3/31/09.

⁷³ Ananth said that in NPTEL courses, “the content is very similar to what we teach in IIT, but our students are typically more mathematically prepared than others, so we have to add some modules.” (IIT courses are typically 40 lectures, but an NPTEL course can include as many as 56, to provide remedial help to users who might need it.) He said that the project’s leaders wanted to make sure the courses were useful to students who might not be at the IIT level, but he felt strongly that the IITs shouldn’t dilute their quality if they wanted to share the courses with external audiences. He explained that, in order not to appear to condescend, the IITs elected to supplement their core content rather than change it (interview with M. S. Ananth, 4/2/09). The OLI pursued a similar approach in deploying its statistics course in community colleges.

⁷⁴ Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 4/1/09.

⁷⁵ A recent NPTEL brochure cites Google Analytics data, stating that the NPTEL site received over 100,000 visitors per month in the fall of 2008. The usage statistics have also revealed that the video courses are far more popular than the web courses—a finding that, according to Ray, makes sense: “Inspiration comes from [the professor’s] voice modulation, from the face, from the way he presents the material” (interview with Anup Ray, 4/3/09).

⁷⁶ National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning, “Project Document: July 2003-June 2006,” 32, 35.

⁷⁷ Interview with R.K. Shevgaonkar, 4/9/09.

⁷⁸ Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 4/1/09.

⁷⁹ Ibid. In addition, the ministry placed ads in several major Indian newspapers announcing the launch of NPTEL (interview with Kushal Sen, 4/6/09).

⁸⁰ Interviews with M. S. Ananth, 4/2/09, and Kannan M. Moudgalya, 4/8/09. In Moudgalya’s words, “We have not publicized it, because when NPTEL started, it was not clear how successful it would be.”

⁸¹ Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 4/1/09. This is certainly true in the United States as well, but universities like MIT and Yale have recently begun to invest more resources in brand management than the IITs.

⁸² Jebaraj, “IIT Online Learning Courses Gaining Momentum.”

⁸³ Rangarajan, “NPTEL Streaming Knowledge to All.”

⁸⁴ “HRD Ministry Announces National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning,” Hindustan Times, online edition, September 19, 2006. At least one article couches NPTEL in decidedly nationalistic terms with the headline “Thanks, But We Don’t Need Your Courses: IITs Tell MIT” (Indian Express, online edition, December 8, 2007).

⁸⁵ Plotkin, Hal, “Free Higher Education: MIT’s OpenCourseWare Plan Fires the First Real Shot,” SF Gate (San Francisco Chronicle), May 10, 2001, http://www.sfgate.com/cgibin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2001/05/10/mit.DTL; Mayfield, Kendra. “All the World’s an MIT Campus,” Wired, online edition, October 4, 2002.

⁸⁶ Ananth for one believes “it is too early to calculate the impact” (interview with M. S. Ananth, 4/2/09).

⁸⁷ Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 4/1/09.

⁸⁸ Interview with Paul Goodman, 3/19/09.

⁸⁹ Interview with Kushal Sen, 4/6/09.

⁹⁰ Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 4/1/09.

⁹¹ Interview with M.S. Ananth, 4/2/09.

⁹² Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 2/23/09.

⁹³ Interview with R. K. Shevgaonkar, 4/9/09.

⁹⁴ Interview with Devang V. Khakhar, 4/9/09.

⁹⁵ Interviews with Anup Ray, 4/3/09, Kannan M. Moudgalya, 4/8/09, and R. K. Shevgaonkar, 4/9/09.

⁹⁶ While the initiative has received national coverage, press attention for NPTEL outside India has been very limited. (However, an NPTEL course was listed at number 5 in a New York Times item on the top ten most popular university course videos on YouTube; see “What They’re Watching,” New York Times, online edition, April 8, 2010.)

⁹⁷ Interview with Kannan M. Moudgalya, 4/8/09. Khakhar agreed: to the suggestion that perhaps high school students in India might use NPTEL to help decide where to go to college, he replied, “They don’t have many other choices” (interview with Devang V. Khakhar, 4/9/09).

⁹⁸ Ibid.

⁹⁹ India works on five-year plans, and the next plan, which would guide government spending from 2008 through 2012, was being written.

¹⁰⁰ As of early 2009, the IITs had collectively contributed about $1 million toward keeping the project going, with the intention of repaying themselves from the second NPTEL grant once it became available.

¹⁰¹ The MHRD awarded NPTEL 96 crores for Phase II, or about $20.8 million (Jebaraj, Priscilla, “Learning Material for IIT Courses Goes Online in Phase II,” The Hindu, English edition, online edition, June 14, 2009).

¹⁰² Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 3/31/09.

¹⁰³ Ibid.; quoted in Aujla, Simmi, and Ben Terris, “Around the World, Varied Approaches to Open Online Learning,” Chronicle of Higher Education,online edition, October 11, 2009. Of course, NPTEL does not offer credentialing or feedback, so it is by no means a direct replacement for a traditional university experience.

¹⁰⁴ Interview with M. S. Ananth, 4/2/09.

¹⁰⁵ Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 3/31/09. UNICEF reports 2000–7 statistics placing India’s adult literacy rate at 66 percent (United Nations Children’s Fund, “India: Statistics,” http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/india_statistics.html).

¹⁰⁶ The web courses tend to vary in presentation style and quality, but Krishnan said that in Phase II resources will be devoted to filling in any holes and bringing all of the courses up to the same standard (interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 3/31/09).

¹⁰⁷ Interview with M. S. Ananth, 4/2/09.

¹⁰⁸ Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 4/1/09.

¹⁰⁹ Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 3/31/09. According to Krishnan, IIT Delhi has been promised significant government funding for a project on virtual laboratories, to be associated with NPTEL content. These would allow students to do the labs at a distance. Krishnan remarked that in India most students in the private colleges do not have access to physical laboratories at all and thus have no way to perform hands-on experiments.

¹¹⁰ Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 4/1/09.

¹¹¹ Press Information Bureau, Government of India, “The National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL),” press release, September 19, 2006, http://pib.nic.in/release/release.asp?relid=20799&kwd.

¹¹² Interview with M. S. Ananth, 4/2/09.

¹¹³ Interview with R. K. Shevgaonkar, 4/9/09.

¹¹⁴ Interview with M. S. Ananth, 4/2/09.

¹¹⁵ Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 3/31/09.

¹¹⁶ Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 4/1/09.

¹¹⁷ National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning, “Frequently Asked Questions.”

¹¹⁸ Interview with Kushal Sen, 4/6/09.