Aricent Technologies, a pure-play product engineering services firm, as part of its corporate social responsibility (CSR) activity, has partnered with the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
NPTEL has created the world’s largest online repository of courses in engineering (http://nptel.ac.in), which is open to all students across the globe. As the medium of instruction is English and a large fraction of students are not fluent in it, there is always a need for transcribing and translating these courses.
Exam fees
While the online course content is free, the certification is given after an examination, for which students are charged a fee of ₹1,000. According to a survey conducted by NPTEL, a large percentage of students, despite getting good assignment scores, did not register for the certification exam, as many of them came from weak economic backgrounds and could not afford it.
The funding received from Aricent will be used for the financially needy students to register for these exams, and will enable the creation of new courses and fund the transcription/translation of existing as well as new courses.
Dr Andrew Thangaraj, in-charge of NPTEL, said: “NPTEL online certification courses are making a real impact on the ground providing access to high quality education for students. The participation and partnership of companies is beneficial both to the company in their recruitment/training processes and to the students, adding value to the certification. We appreciate the support from Aricent, which has partnered with us in the creation of new courses and in offering scholarships to help economically needy students write the exams.”
Aricent has 20-plus years’ experience co-creating ambitious products with the top networking, telecom, software, semiconductor, Internet and industrial companies. The firm's 10,000-plus engineers focus exclusively on software-powered innovation for the connected world. Key investors are KKR & Co. LP and Sequoia Capital.
Popular YouTube channel
NPTEL is one of the most popular education channels on YouTube. More than 17,000 hours of video have been uploaded in NPTEL’s YouTube channel, and the portal constitutes the most accessed library of peer-reviewed educational content in the world. All the courses are available for free viewing and download as the contents are shared under the licence Creative Commons-By-Share Alike.
Some courses are now also being offered for certification, and are run in the classroom mode with increased input and involvement from the faculty. The number of online certification courses completed is 57 while 24 are still running. The portal has more than two lakh unique users. The courses are open to anyone anywhere in the world to enrol and learn for free.