As my eyes ran down the table of contents of Unlocking the Gates (Princeton University Press), a new book by Taylor Walsh that focuses primarily on efforts by top U.S. universities, including MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Yale, to offer their courses online, I was pleased to see a case study from another country. While U.S. online courseware ventures are often viewed, correctly, as offering opportunities for learners in the rest of the world to take advantage of educational resources in the West, albeit without earning degrees, these programs are by no means the only game in town. The book devoted a chapter to India’s National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL), a home-grown effort to meet the country’s urgent need to improve both the quality and the reach of engineering education.
The development of NPTEL over the past decade or so was driven by a combination of factors: huge demand for engineering education; a scarcity of slots in the famed Indian Institutes of Technology, or IITs, which admit just 2 or 3 percent of applicants; and deep concerns about the abilities of the 400,000 or so engineers India produces each year. Walsh quotes a 2005 report by the McKinsey Global Institute that said just one in four engineers in India “would be suitable…to work for multinational companies.”
Founded and headed by a respected educational leader, IIT-Madras director M.S. Ananth, the NPTEL initiative aims to give free, high-quality web and video course materials from seven IITs (as well as the Indian Institute of Science) to students and faculty at engineering and science colleges outside the IIT system. There’s a selfish motive for the IITs, to be sure – trying to create a pipeline of better-trained candidates for their graduate programs – but leaders of the project also have much bigger aspirations. In the words of Ananth: “The broad aim of the NPTEL project is to facilitate the competitiveness of Indian industry in the global markets.” There are now more than 250 courses available, with around 1,000 envisioned as the program expands enormously in its next phase.
I was intrigued to read in Unlocking the Gates that while the “vast majority” of NPTEL’s users come from within Indian, the next largest group is from the United States – evidence that the global reach of online offerings needn’t only go from West to East. But the project’s central aim of making the best curriculum available to Indians on a mass basis hasn’t yet been realized. Reliable usage levels aren’t available, but traffic to the program’s Web site has thus far been less expected, according to Walsh. This might be partly because of poor marketing – there are no staff dedicated to this activity, which isn’t necessarily the central strength of the professors who lead the initiative. Still, a second round of government funding in March 2009 had the program participants interviewed by Walsh optimistic that NPTEL will be sustained and expanded, possibly with eventual support from the Indian business community.
Like their U.S. counterparts, the IITs have been reluctant to offer course credits or degrees through the program for fear of compromising academic quality. That’s an understandable concern – after all, elite universities’ gatekeeper function is a core part of their valued brands. “Our entrance is very tight, we don’t want to just give a certificate or degree to anybody,” one IIT professor who serves as an NPTEL program organizer told Walsh. But since the book was completed, the Times of India recently reported that project coordinators have announced plans to offer “the equivalent of a degree or a diploma to students enrolled in the virtual university.” I doubt that will take place through a simple or smooth process. But if NPTEL’s architects can pull it off, offering greatly expanded opportunities to earn real-world credentials seems like a logical next step, one that could fulfill the promise of online deliveryto bring top-quality, credit-bearing university classes to scale.
