The National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) was initiated by seven Indian Institutes of Technology (Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras, Guwahati and Roorkee) along with the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 2003. Five core disciplines were identified, namely, civil engineering, computer science and engineering, electrical engineering, electronics and communication engineering and mechanical engineering and 235 courses in web/video format were developed in this phase.

The main goal of NPTEL Phase II (2009-14) was to build on the engineering and core science courses launched previously in NPTEL Phase I. An additional 600 web and video courses were created in all major branches of engineering, physical sciences at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels and management courses at the postgraduate level. Several improvements such as indexing of all video and web courses and keyword search were implemented.

Some highlights:

Largest online repository in the world of courses in engineering, basic sciences and selected humanities and social sciences subjects

Youtube channel for NPTEL – most subscribed educational channel, 1 billion views and 42+ lakhs subscribers

More than 56000 hours of video content

Most accessed library of peer-reviewed educational content in the world

52000+ hours of transcribed content; 51000+ hours of subtitled videos

NPTEL began offering open online courses in March 2014 along with certificates from the IITs/IISc for those who completed the courses successfully.

It is now possible for ANYONE outside the IIT System to be able to do an online certification course from NPTEL and get a certificate from the IITs. IITs are reaching out and taking education to the homes of people through this initiative.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) is essentially an asynchronous platform and a process for teaching through pre-recorded lectures, resource video materials, lecture notes, assignments and quizzes, which are usually online and provide self assessment in regular intervals during learning.

The learning, through scheduling of fixed time duration for completion of courses and, therefore, the simultaneous participation of teachers and a large number of students may be termed synchronous and is thus similar to a classroom, albeit on the Internet and being much larger in size.

When offered with consideration for students in non-urban and rural areas through supplementary DVDs and mobile delivered content, they enable quality and equitable access to a much larger population of students and can lead to a significant rise in the Gross Enrollment Ratio.

These courses are open for anyone to access – at no cost. So anyone who is interested in learning gets access to quality content, which also includes discussion with the content creator and access to assignments for self testing.

The faculty who are currently offering courses are from the IITs or from other reputed institutes such as CMI, IMSc etc.

The objective of enabling students obtain certificates for courses is to make students employable in the industry or pursue a suitable higher education programme.

Through an online portal, 4-, 8-, or 12-week online courses, typically on topics relevant to students in all years of higher education along with basic core courses in sciences and humanities with exposure to relevant tools and technologies, are being offered. The enrolment to and learning from these courses involves no cost. Following these online courses, an in-person, proctored certification exam will be conducted and a certificate is provided through the participating institutions and industry, when applicable.

Some statistics regarding the open online courses since March 2014 till Jun 2021

Completed courses: 2000+;

Enrollments across courses: 1 CRORE +

Number of exam registrations: 11.8 LAKH +

All the statistics pertaining to completed courses are available at https://archive.nptel.ac.in/noc/.

All courses are completely free to enrol and learn from. The certification exam is optional and comes at a fee of Rs 1000/course exam.

Certification process: NPTEL began the initiative of offering certification to students for courses in March 2014. The process of certification is as follows.

1. Subject Matter Experts (SME - faculty from IITs or partner institutes with input from industry) create recorded video content for courses.

2. The course is uploaded on the portal and opened for enrollments, which is free.

3. Every week, about 3 hrs of video content is released along with an assignment , which is evaluated and provides the student with a score.

4. Teaching Assistants (TAs) and the faculty members support the discussion forum – answering questions and clearing doubts.

5. If someone wants to get a certificate from the IITs/IISc after doing the course, he/she should register for the in-person proctored certification exam that is conducted in 100+ cities across India in collaboration with an exam partner. The certification exam is not free but has a nominal fee of Rs 1000.

6. Final score=25% assignment score + 75% exam score. The pass criteria for exams is being changed from July 2019. A learner will pass and be certified only if Average assignment score (out of 100) >= 40 AND Final exam score ( out of 100) >= 40. E-verifiable certificates are made available on archive.nptel.ac.in/noc Only e-certificates will be published. Hard copies of certificates will NOT be printed.
The pass criteria depends on the courses. The above mentioned is applicable for most of the courses but for those courses which have non proctored programming exams and for medical courses, the pass criteria is different and will be mentioned in the course announcement page.

7. These certificates are envisioned for use in credit transfer to universities or for making the student more employable or for enhancing his growth in his current place of work.

UGC and AICTE are actively encouraging colleges and Universities to adopt atleast one online course a semester for credit transfer. Many have already incorporated the same. Also several IITs such as IIT Madras, IIT Roorkee, IIT Tirupati, IIT Palakkad, etc are allowing these courses to be taken for credits. So too, IIIT Delhi, IIIT Hyderabad, etc.

Many students are using these to prepare for GATE exams and higher studies too.

20% of the audience is faculty members in various colleges across the country. The advanced courses are being recommended to AICTE to be approved as Faculty development programs (FDP) so that they can get the points for the same.

1. Enables the student to directly engage and learn from the best faculty in the country in that particular subject. This strengthens the fundamentals of the student in the course

2. Gives the students the opportunities to explore new areas of interest – which are not possible in regular college environment. Also gives students the opportunity to learn in greater depth the subjects they wish to master. These courses are also serving as faculty development programmes (15-20% of enrollments are by faculty in different colleges).

3. The audience in a MOOC includes students spanning the length and breadth of India and a small fraction of foreign students. This mix of peer group gives the students a chance to assess where they stand with respect to this group of learners.

4. These courses also bring out the self-learning initiative of the students – where their own motivation is what drives them to complete the course and not external compulsions. This fosters the habit of keeping oneself updated always by means of self-study.

5. The certificates issued bear the stamp of CCE, IIT and hence are valuable additions when the student is applying for jobs.

6. Companies can also dig into this pool of candidates with specialized skills – in case they wish to recruit.

NPTEL partners with around 4200+ colleges as on date in the form of NPTEL Local chapters and each college has a coordinator with who NPTEL works closely with. (http://archive.nptel.ac.in/LocalChapter/)

NPTEL has recently embarked on an initiative called NPTEL Industry Associate to bridge the gap with the industry wherein they can co-offer courses in their area of expertise, conduct workshops for NPTEL certified students in niche domains, offer internships, jobs, etc. Course toppers are provided an opportunity to take internship with industry /course instructor Read More

522 courses across disciples are being offered for certification.
Enrolment (joining) to courses is FREE.
To write exams and obtain certificate, you have to register and pay Rs. 1000/- per course.Course List

Laboratory workshops - in person, to give hands-on experience to learners
Lab workshops for students at some of the top institutes, such as the IITs, IISERs and IIITs is proposed, which will be attended by them in person. Read More

Internships for course toppers with course instructors
To improve the skills and employability of students and to prepare them for taking up jobs in the industry. Read More

Soft Skills Workshops for improving employability : Train students to face interviews, hold mock interviews, train in business communication skills - speaking and writing.

GATE exams: This effort will create a portal that has both video content and aligned questions from previous year question papers. Read More

Support to attend technical conference: NPTEL to sponsor the cost of travel and conference registration fees for Coordinators of different Local Chapters (colleges who partner with NPTEL). This will help them upgrade themselves and be abreast of the latest developments in the field which will benefit the students they are teaching. Read More

Analytics of the data accrued: This will help identify the gaps in course offering and better the pedagogy and learning experience.

Continuous portal development: Will help us incorporate more features for better testing of knowledge accrued.

Translation of English Transcripts of NPTEL Videos: Translation of the English transcripts of NPTEL video courses are being carried out in 10 regional languages. The goal is to help the students coming from local language schooling. Read More

NPTEL Stars: NPTEL recognizes our learners with the following categories who have excelled in various ways.
- NPTEL DOMAIN SCHOLARS
- NPTEL SUPERSTARS
- NPTEL EVANGELISTS
- NPTEL MOTIVATED LEARNERS
- NPTEL ENTHUSIASTS
- NPTEL DISCIPLINE STARS
- NPTEL BELIEVERS
Please visit this Link: https://archive.nptel.ac.in/nptelStars/index.html