Sunday, May 16, 2010
Bid to Reach Out to more Students

Mumbai: After half a century of being an exclusive club, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) will finally open their gates a little more. Assigned the task of reaching out to a sizeable population of Indian students, IIT directors are drawing up plans to set up a virtual university.

“The plan is to have a virtual university of some kind; we basically want to make quality education accessible to many more students using modern tools instead of setting up brick-and-mortar campuses,” said IIT-Madras director M S Ananth. The proposal has been accepted under the National Mission on Education through ICT (NMEICT). But Ananth was quick to add that the details were yet to be worked out and rolling out the plan would take about two years. “We will involve industry in administering the programme. Moreover, we need to create labs where students can perform experiments. The IITs will take care of the entry, the exit and develop the courses,” he explained.

In a way, the job has already begun. The IITs and the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science have already designed 240 courses that were captured on video in the studios set up in the IITs. Now, they will develop 1,000 more courses in the second phase. The IITs have also piloted the work of running virtual labs.