National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) is an initiative funded by Ministry of Human Resource and Development, Government of India and coordinated by IIT Madras and other IITs. The project's central idea is to put recorded lectures taught by its member institutes online with open access. It is already the most viewed educational youtube channel and largest online repository in the world of courses in engineering, basic sciences and selected humanities and social sciences subjects.[1][2]
History
NPTEL was initiated in 2003 by seven IITs (Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras, Guwahati and Roorkee) along with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.[3]
Since March 2014, NPTEL began offering online courses along with certificates from IITs/IISc to those who completed the courses successfully. [2]
Statistics
According to Alexa, it’s ranked at 155 in India and 1472 globally.[4] Its YouTube channel, has more than 1,400,000 subscribers, 20000 videos and over 332 million views.[5] In comparison, MIT OpenCourseware has nearly 2 million subscribers, but fewer than half the views (164 million views).[6] But Youtube stats alone don’t give a full measure of this mammoth beast. Its content is also free to download, available on DVDs, and distributed under the CC BY-SA (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike) license.[3]