4.

Details of the Proposal:

4. 1 Designing Feedback and Interactions among Content
Developers and Users for Effective Implementation of
NPTEL Courseware: The development of web and video
supplementary materials in 239 new courses and 110
existing video courses in NPTEL Phase I jointly by PIs in
India is a unique nationwide exercise, it is important to
ensure that course contents are effectively used by the
target group of teachers, students and working
professionals This has to be done in several ways
simultaneously and each of those processes must be
implemented for a long period of time as there is no
clearly defined or unique process for effective utilization
by users at a distance from the traditional class room.
Some of those methods are described here. However,
prior to implementation of various strategies for effective
usage, information dissemination must happen and the
requirement of the target audience must be understood.
The following steps have already been taken: All the user
institutions (more than 1500 at present) have to be
informed about the objectives of the NPTEL programme,
the target audience it is meant for, and the ease of use of
contents by various teachers. With this objective, a
detailed programme document was made for circulation
to all colleges and University departments. The Indian
Society for Technical Education has been requested to
carry feature articles on NPTEL and announce periodically
the updates of course contents that are available. The
website http://nptel.iitm.ac.in was officially launched on

September 5, 2006, and it has been updated with course

materials periodically. Visitors to this website have been
requested to register themselves free of charge. The site
is being continually updated and during the period
January 2008 to January 2009 1,041,218 visits have been
recorded. This is a sign of the expectations````````
building up among the users and their interest in using
the contents developed so far. The profile of the users is
given below, and covers geographically 186 countries. 10
User distribution 11 More than 70 percent of the users are
from India. The users outside of India are mostly from the
United States, United Kingdom, Canada United Arab
Emirates and Singapore with the remaining being
distributed globally. The number of registrants to this
website has been seeing a steady increase on a daily
basis and the trend is only likely to continue. However, in
view of the number of students currently enrolled in
engineering programmes throughout the country
(approximately 1.6 million) and the number of teachers
(approximately 20.000) the access rate of the NPTEL
website must be enormously improved over the current
numbers through information dissemination. The
numbers will increase at least by an order of magnitude if
the video materials are converted into a streaming format
and made 12 available at a bandwidth of 512 kbps across
all IIT / IISc websites in a distributed manner. This is
possible if each IIT / IISc is given an adequate Internet
bandwidth (50 Mbps) dedicated for this purpose. In
addition, a large number of working professionals who are
interested in specific courses should be able to get them

in DVDROMs. It has been a year since the site was

registered with Google to provide extended data on
users. The following figures suggest that the site (both
the web and the video courses) is used quite well by
students and teachers worldwide. The data on video
through exposure to a limited number of the video
courses and on all web courses for a short period indicate
that the access rate has also enormously improved in the
last few months. In the Appendix the comments by the
viewers of the video channel are enclosed .