Check out what I found on the YouTube blog today:
Earlier this week, we announced the launch of YouTube EDU (youtube.com/edu), a hub for videos from over 100 of our leading university and college partners. Think campus tours, news about cutting-edge research, and lectures by professors and world-renowned thought leaders. There are also 200 full (and free!) courses, in a range of subjects, from some of the world’s most prestigious universities, including IIT/IISc, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and Yale.
That’s right, that was IIT/IISc before MIT and the other American universities! (IIT/IISc = Indian Institute of Technology/Indian Institute of Science).(Sorry, I have a juvenile pride when it comes to anything Indian).
The IIT/IISc YouTube channel is part of the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTel)’s efforts “to enhance the quality of engineering education in the country by developing curriculum based video and web courses.”
The channel is pretty nifty. Over 14,000 subscribers and over 600,000 channel views, AND it has the YouTube award for Most Subscribed India. The channel contains 3,589 video lectures on the a bunch of topics: Core Sciences, Civil Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Communication Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering.
I was surprised to find that NPTel is funded by the Ministry of Human Resource Development aka the Government of India. Proposals for this project began in 1999 (IITs and IIScs first began talking about it with Carnegie Mellon University in 1993), and the videos were finally uploaded in June 2007. The site is a boon for Indian universities, teachers and students alike. This article discusses some of the problems in the Indian education system that NPTel is working to solve – namely the lack of resources to train enough professors for all the universities, and the lack of seats at existing IITs and IIScs.
I still can’t get over how awesome this project is. I’m not sure how many people know of it and how good it is… I’ll ask a few of my engineering friends (namely @dmehta1759). I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of this before…. despite me not living in India for the last seven years or being an engineering student… oh well. Now I do, and so do you! 
Future Plans
According to an article in The Hindu:
NPTEL also envisages forging of strong ties with major academic initiatives worldwide such as MIT OCW, Commonwealth of Learning, British Open University, Australian Open Universities and the Digital Library for developing new technological tools for learning and dissemination, in order to benefit every student in the country.
You can read more about the efforts of the NPTel at their website.
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