Video lectures by IIT faculty now available for all engineering students during Covid-19 lockdown

Engineering students, who had wished to study at an Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) but couldn’t make it, have a reason to cheer. Video lectures by faculty

Engineering students, who had wished to study at an Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) but couldn’t make it, have a reason to cheer. Video lectures by faculty from various IITs are now being telecasted through educational channels on TV.

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The video content has been prepared by all major IITs in the country to help engineering students who are unable to attend classes due to the Covid-19 lockdown.

“Lectures are recorded at home by faculty members from many central universities. They are then telecasted through the Swayam Prabha channels,” said K Mangala Sunder, head of the department of chemistry at IIT-Madras, and chief coordinator, DTH Swayam Prabha.

Swayam Prabha is a group of 34 direct to home channels launched by the ministry of education for telecasting educational programmes all through the day. The lectures from IITs on engineering courses will be telecast on channels 11 through 18. The first such lecture was broadcast on August 28.

Classes for the online semester at IIT-Bombay (IIT-B) kicked off on August 10 and lectures delivered by faculty members were recorded. The institute has prepared videos for 30 courses for this semester and they will be telecast depending on slots available on the channels. “We are enthusiastic about this project and have completed recordings. We are now handing them over to Swayam Prabha,” said Kannan Moudgalya, professor, department of chemical engineering, and coordinator for the Swayam Prabha project at IIT-B.

According to Sunder, the focus was to create crash courses with an emphasis on problem-solving approaches. The regular 40-50-hour lectures of an entire course were condensed to 10-15 hrs for fast assimilation by students during the lockdown. They were created to meet or exceed the academic standards set by the University Grants Commission (UGC) and other academic bodies such as the All India Council of Technical Education.