Aware that they are recognised internationally for quality education, the seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, have decided not to join OpenCourseWare (OCW), a project for providing free online course material initiated by none other than the reputed Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

OCW already hosts courses developed by well-known universities like Yale, Harvard Law School, Notre Dame, Tufts, and Utah State. But the IITs and IISc have declined MIT’s request, made earlier this year, for them to put courses on that site.

“Some of our directors felt that why don’t we keep this to India and not let IITs join OCW? We decided to stick to our brand and keep our project parallel to that of MIT’s,” said Prof M S Ananth, director of IIT Madras and national co-ordinator for the IITs’ own free online courses under the National Programme for Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL), which MIT was seeking to upload on OCW.

He said the objective of both, NPTEL and OCW, was the same — distributing education free of cost — but the IITs would rather have MIT join the NPTEL initiative: “MIT courses could be uploaded as electives later in our project. We have not snapped links with MIT and we could get them on board in future.”

While MIT’s project displays lecture notes and study materials for anyone to access, NPTEL provides online access to five streams of study in engineering - civil, computer science, electronics & communication, electrical, and mechanical. These are made available in collaboration with IISc, Bangalore.

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