Bangalore: IIT lectures can now be accessed by MIT students. The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) has agreed to the proposal of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to join their Open Course Ware (OCW) community. This program would allow the MIT students to view and use classroom content of the IIT.

This is not all! Soon the IIT’s classroom lectures will be made available on Apple’s multi-media platform iTunes. As a matter of fact, YouTube already has a channel for IIT courses that had 63.64 lakh viewers as on December, 2011 as reported by TOI.

MIT had first invited IIT’s to join the OCW community in 2007 but then the IITs had declined the offer as they  felt their initiatives was too young to join the world of open source learning. But now four years later, the IITs feel that they have caught up with the other members of the open source community. Several other well known universities like Harvard Law School, Yale, Peking, Tufts, Notre Dame, UC Irvine and Utah State have also allowed MIT to host links to their courseware. The Indian Institute of Management (Bangalore) is also a member of MIT's Open Course Ware.

Mangala Sunder Krishnan, the Coordinator for the National Programme for Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) in IIT-Madras said "We have finally decided to join the Open Education Resource Consortium. This will help us share open source tools. It's an academic enhancement exercise."

The NPTEL is a program on similar lines as OCW which was jointly launched by seven of the old IITs and the Indian Institute of Science. Currently, NPTEL has over a thousand courses in technology and humanities. The basic difference seen between the efforts put in by the American universities into open courses and the NPTEL is that the American universities have an enriching exercise, not fully substituting class work; while NPTEL encompasses all topics in every course, from their introduction to the end, allowing students to sit at home and study.

It is noted that more than 500 Indian engineering colleges have been given the NPTEL content which can be accessed by students through the college intranet. The NPTEL website has increased number of visitors from 9.37 lakh in 2008 to 44.39 lakh in 2011.