Find 'standard study materials' of IITs in NPTEL.
What is NPTEL?
NPTEL is an acronym for National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning which is an initiative by all seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc) for creating course contents in engineering and science.
Why NPTEL?
In India there are approximately 5,00,000 (five lakhs or half a million) students who have been joining the engineering programme annually for the last few years. Industry estimates that less than ten percent of them are employable soon after their graduation. Manpower requirements are much higher than this figure (and are believed to be at least an order of magnitude more). There are more than 1500 private engineering colleges which have been started in the last twenty years and a substantial fraction of them in the last ten years. A majority of them do not have the minimum required number of well-qualified teaching faculty in each discipline. Despite this, many of them offer technological programs such as information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology etc. which are highly interdisciplinary programs, and continue to neglect traditional science and engineering disciplines which are fundamental constituents of such interdisciplinary programs. There is an alarming level of neglect of sound pedagogical principles which are fundamental to discovering such super technologies.
The number of teachers that get trained every year is less than 2 percent of what we actually need. The teacher-to-student ratio for a good learning ambience in educational institutions is roughly between 1:10 and 1:16. Given that India needs approximately 1,60,000 teachers for engineering education for a student population of about twenty lakhs (two million), institutions of higher learning in India are barely able to train more than 4000 teachers every year and offer them jobs. Over and above, teaching career for them is also among the least attractive alternatives in the current socio-economic setup.
Technology for learning and teaching is already available and the cost per computer power/performance levels of technology tools will only go down with time. Indian students are much more comfortable with cell phones, computers and internet based communication such as e-mail, chat etc. Creating a technology-based learning medium and content delivery through the internet is thus a natural method for faculty to impart in the young minds concepts of science and engineering which have shaped human lives for the last two hundred years or more.
Computer Science Study Materials
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