 Welcome to this workshop on NPTEL, the National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning. Through this set of videos, we would like to give you a brief introduction to what the NPTEL project is about, what we offer as courses there, how do you get certificates from NPTEL, from the various IITs, IACs and other institutes that offer courses through NPTEL and all the other allied initiatives of NPTEL which are like the internships, the faculty development program, local chapters, the soft skill training etc. So, we will walk you through each of these one by one going forward in the videos that come. So, about NPTEL, NPTEL is one of the longest running successful multi-institutional education projects. So, it was started in the year 2003 and we complete 20 years of the NPTEL project this year in 2023. NPTEL is also one of the largest repositories of engineering content in the world. The vision of NPTEL is to provide high quality affordable education at scale. So, this is more a project where we are giving access to the content that is taught within the premier institutes such as the IITs, IACs and other institutes such as CMI, IMSC, ISERs, the triple IITs etc. to anybody who is motivated and wishes to study this particular content. It is completely free, the access to all the content is available on our website nptel.ac.in and here are some numbers just to say how popular and widely used NPTEL is. The NPTEL videos are all available on YouTube, our channel NPTEL HRD where more than 60,000 hours of video content which is primarily engineering humanities and management content on NPTEL. The viewership for this has crossed about 1.6 billion views so far and we have more than about 3000 courses in our repository and the YouTube subscriber base is more than 4.5 millions. You should just remember this is not any entertainment content we are giving out but this is like very rigorous, high quality engineering management and content from the sciences division that we are putting out on our channels and the NPTEL repository. So, like I said it can be accessed from anywhere for free. There is no charge, no payment required to access any of the content that is available on the NPTEL website. Anybody can view this content from anywhere around the world at any time. So basically it's like an online reference library, you can think of it like that where we have more than 3000 subject books available in the form of video lectures. No login is also required, we don't capture your login details unless absolutely essential so you can actually do a free browsing of the entire content that we have on our website. There are such facilities where you can search for specific courses by institute, by discipline etc. So, what is a course typically contained on NPTEL? We'll also look into another aspect of it which is the certification courses but on the website each course primarily will have of course the syllabus of the course whatever is being taught in that course then there will be video lectures that will be the primary content of the course. The text transcripts every video is transcribed and subtitled so these are also available as notes in PDF format for you to download and read so there are text transcripts that are available, there are notes that are given whatever the faculty has used maybe during the recording of the course or as additional reading material, notes are provided to the learners in most courses wherever applicable sample assignments along with solutions have also been archived so you can also check after completing a week's content whether you are able to handle the assignment and whether you are able to answer the questions given there Many of the courses are now being translated into regional Indian languages so the transcripts are also available and translated into other languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and so on so the effort is ongoing wherever it is available it is also available inside the course on the portal the transcripts are available and the statistics for courses that we run for certification are also available under each course as a tab called statistics where you can see how many times we ran the course, how many people enrolled, how many people got certified who are the toppers in this course and so on so this is the content we have primarily on the NPTEL website We offer more than 1400 courses per year for certifications so one part is the repository where you can just access think of it as a library you go in, you watch videos, you learn for yourself but if you want to take a certificate in any particular course from NPTEL we also offer these courses for certification We are a partner of Swayam the swayam.gov.in the National MOOCs portal of India and we offer courses for certification on this portal More than 1400 courses are offered every year for certification in two semesters January semester and the July semester Let's look at the relationship between NPTEL and Swayam NPTEL was a project started in 2003 primarily for content creation and in 2014 we started offering courses for certification In 2017 the Ministry of Education launched the Swayam portal which is the National MOOCs portal of India So under the Swayam portal there are 10 coordinators for various verticals of education NPTEL is the national coordinator for engineering education primarily both the UG and the PG levels NPTEL also takes care of the technical maintenance of the Swayam portal getting a new features and seeing that the portal runs very smoothly without any glitches all through the year So what has been NPTEL's certification journey since 2014 Again here are some numbers that you can see for yourself The number of certification courses that we have completed on Swayam so far is 5372 courses offered for certification The enrollment till June 2023 has been 2.3 crores More than 28.6 lakh learners have registered to write the certification exams and more than 18.8 lakh learners have been certified by NPTEL so far What are the components of a certification course and how does it typically work? This is what is normally called as a massive open online course or a MOOC But of course in NPTEL we also have specialized PG level, PhD level courses which are not necessarily massive but of course they also do have 300, 400 learners in it and who follow the course and complete the examinations in it So the typical content that we would offer as part of an NPTEL certification course is first primarily the video content So the videos are recorded by faculty in the premier institutes like we already said So that would be about maybe 10 to 12 hours if it is a 4 week course We have an 8 week course duration so it could be about 20 to 23, 25 hours there and a 12 week course duration where the content could be between 30 to 40 hours So the primary will be the video lectures by the faculty who also has been teaching this course within the institute and is an expert in this particular area So that is the first part of the certification course The second most important part of the certification course will be weekly assignments So in every course of NPTEL, every single week we have assignments that we give as part of that week So the learner is expected to watch the video lectures and attend the assignments Assignments can be of different types We have something called auto graded assignments where it could be just a multiple choice question multiple select questions where the question has more than one possible answer There could be short answer questions or fill in the blank type of questions where a problem may be given, you have to solve the problem and enter the answer onto the portal It could be something where you have to enter one word or maybe a phrase or something which is again auto corrected So these are the kind of auto graded questions we have The second type of assignments we have are programming assignments So programming assignments are normally used in courses where the learners require to program So these are also auto graded and the portal currently supports C, C++, Python, Java, Verilog Haskell programming The portal supports all these languages for auto graded programming assignments So the learner will have to submit a program There is something called a private test case and a public test case and based on the input-output system the learner gets marks for these programming assignments So all the programming courses we run actually have hands-on programs that have to be written as part of the course assignment, the weekly assignment that we give The third type of assignment that we have is subjective assignments which are manually graded So in this case the learner might have to maybe write an essay and submit it or maybe we will have to do some kind of a design document maybe some derivation, some proofs They have to write it or type it on a document and they have to upload the document The faculty and their team of teaching assistants manually validate these and then they mark the assignments for subjective assignment category of questions The fourth type that we have is peer reviewed assignments where a submission by a learner is normally reviewed by the other students in the same course So they do peer reviews and they rate each other's work and the final result is based on what the others feel about your assignments So these are the type of assignments and assignments are very very important in an NPTEL course because the assignments also contribute to your final exam score if you are going to write the exam as well as there is a cut-off you have to cross to get the certificate for an NPTEL course The third component that is there in an NPTEL certification course is text transcripts There might be some lab demos that we are doing If it is a theory course that has an associated lab we might have shot some experiments in the laboratory and also put it there for your reference that you can actually watch what is happening in the labs as the experiments are being performed, that is one part So text transcripts are actually documents where we have transcribed the videos completely and we are providing it to you as reading material So maybe once you have watched the video and you want to kind of just refresh and brush up on what has been taught the text transcripts are a useful way of doing it or those people who like to read maybe rather than watch can also go through the transcripts on whatever the faculty has taught in the videos The other important component that we have is the discussion forum This is very very important because this is the connection through which you can communicate with the faculty and team or with your peers in the course So there is a discussion forum in every course If you have doubts, you can ask on the discussion forum and normally within 24 hours there will be somebody who is turning around and giving you the answers to the questions If somebody asks a question, maybe your peer in the group is asking questions and you know the answers to that you can also answer in the discussion forum So this is a very good way in which you can actually showcase your written communication skills and your knowledge in the subject also by helping your friends and maybe asking and getting your doubts cleared The last part is live interaction sessions In many courses we have PMRF scholars who are nowadays doing live sessions teaching sessions, doubt clearing sessions as part of it, it's a weekly session that we are enabling to our duration in at least about 250 to 300 courses where you can participate and you can also interact with them and many times the faculty also come in for a live session maybe once a month or so where you can also interact with the faculty member offering the course to discuss the various aspects of the course So these are the five components that comprise an NPTEL certification course The final exam Though we conduct the entire course and the program online and all you need to access the course is maybe a mobile phone, a computer and definitely an internet connection The final exam that we conduct for an NPTEL certification course if you want to get a certificate from NPTEL you will have to write it at centres within the country that is something that you have to do So the entire course run happens on swyem.gov.in You have to go there, you choose a course and you enroll to a course there There is a start date for the course On that day the materials will start getting released Every Friday we release about maybe 2.5 to 3 hours of videos We release every Friday along with the assignment Discussion forum will be live You can ask questions during that So this will happen during the duration of the course So duration of the course is 4 weeks, 8 weeks or 12 weeks Every Friday we release content which is videos and the assignment From the beginning of the course itself there is an exam form that is open and available for you to register to the final exam In case you want to take up a certificate from NPTEL you have to register to the exam The enrollment on the swyem portal is completely free There is no fee to be paid If you want to just enroll You want to learn, you want to watch videos You want to do assignments You want to ask questions All these are free There is no fee for it If somebody says that you have to pay money please do not believe them The project is completely funded by the Ministry of Education and we are very thankful to them for having supported us for this law Hence the entire content access during the certification course is free But if you want to write the exam and be certified there is a cost to it because we use an exam partner for the same So these exams are conducted at specific centres in about 170, 180 cities across the country in India So you have to go and write the exam in person at any of these cities whichever you choose on the exam dates So the exam dates are fixed for every course It is given on the course page itself You can go and check it out On that day you will have to take your hall ticket and go to the exam centre that we allocate to you and write the exam there So the course fee is Rs. 1000 per course exam that you want to write There are 50% waivers available for students belonging to select categories such as the SCST and PWD categories Once you pass the course and you are eligible for the certificate I will talk about the certification criteria in the next slide You will get a certificate from the IATs or the IAC or the institute that is offering a course I will show you the format also very soon These certificates are E-verifiable which means that there is a QR code printed on the certificate and anybody who scans the QR code can see the original from our server from our website to validate the certificate So that is something that is there We are not doing a hard copy dispatch There is only soft copies that we will make available to you of the certificates We are also conducting exams outside of India We have centres in many countries currently and those we don't have we also conduct remote proctored online exams So if you are a learner from outside India please write to this email id given here and share your details We will also revert with how you can take the exam with us So learners across the globe today can get certified from NPTEL directly by doing the certification exams with us There is no need to go to any other portal Many portals we have seen are hosting NPTEL courses and charging a lot of money for that and giving their own certificates it is not allowed This is the authentic form of NPTEL certification where we run our courses on the SWAYAM portal and we conduct exams from our side So I would urge that all learners actually make use of this facility where we have exams throughout India and we conduct exams for learners outside India also to get certificates from the IITs and the IAC So what is the certification criteria if you want to get a certificate for any NPTEL course That is something that is there So basically the first step you go through all the courses for a particular semester Then you shortlist which all courses you want to do and you join it The joining is free So we would recommend that you even join maybe 5 or 6 or 10 courses because once the enrollment date is over you cannot join any course after that So maybe 5 or 10 courses if you join you can see which course suits you best and then you can decide on what you want to pursue through the semester That is step 1 Then the content starts getting released assignment gets released go through the content go through the assignments see which course is very amenable to you accessible to you which course keeps your interest You would have had some thought of I want to learn all of this from this course whether it matches your goal of learning check that and maybe shortlist it down to 1 or 2 courses that you want to do during the semester So week on week keep studying watch the videos keep submitting the assignment before the deadline So normally assignment we give 10 days of time Wednesday night or Thursday night there are deadlines for the assignments in the courses the date will be given on the assignment page please check that and submit the assignments before the deadlines and once you're confident maybe you've done 2 or 3 weeks of content in the course at that point the exam form is accessible to you already there is a link on the course page which will say register now for the exam click on it and you can register for the exam so we would suggest that you try out maybe 1 or 2 weeks of content see whether it is okay for you and then register for the exam the exam form also has some deadlines the deadlines are all given on the exam form and on the announcements in the announcement section of the course please go through that and before the due date kindly register to the exams and like I said you will come in person to write the exam okay having done all this now how do you get your certificate what is the criteria is it that you just do the course and get the certificate or all those who are up here for the exam are going to get a certificate no we do have a certification criteria as shown in this slide okay so the final score for the course that we calculate there is 25% weightage for the weekly assignments and 75% weightage for the final exam that you write at the centre this is a normal thing maybe a few courses we might change the pattern a little bit based on the nature of the course but broadly this is what we follow across all NPTEL courses and the past criteria if you have to get a certificate from us is average assignment score okay average assignment score should be more than 10 out of 25 and your exam score you should score more than 30 out of 75 it's an AND condition so both conditions should be satisfied and final score automatically becomes more than 40 out of 100 okay how do we calculate the average assignment score average assignment score we take the best 3 out of 4 assignments for a 4 week course the best 6 out of 8 assignments for an 8 week course the best 8 out of 12 weeks for a 12 week course okay so we will take the best course we will average it out that's called your average assignment score and that is what should be more than 10 out of 25 and exam score even if the paper is out of 50 marks or 100 marks depending on what word is configured for we will convert it out of 75 and you should get more than 30 in that okay and there are types of certificates also that we give we also categorize the type of certificate based on what final marks you get so if you get any mark between say 40 to 59 there is only called successful completion of the course that is the certificate we give you let me show you the certificate maybe that is better and this is the format of the certificate that we give as you can see here there is the NPTEL logo on the left the right bottom has the SWIM logo here the institute name and institute logo will come on the bottom left there are signatories from the institute and NPTEL also on the certificate your photo that you give us on the exam form will actually appear on the top right so please give us a good photo that you want to put on the certificate that the IIT is IAC issue you and there are a couple of other parameters like you can see here there is a tag called elite at the top there is a gold medal symbol that you can see here we also mentioned the assignment score and the exam score that you have got here along with of course the course name and the number of students who have appeared for the exam and passed it okay at the bottom there is a QR code which on scanning will actually show you the original certificate from our server so going back now that you have seen this elite tag and gold medal you can see here that 40 to 59 we only call it a successful completion certificate if you get more than 60 marks you get the tag called elite at the top of the certificate if you have between 75 and 89 marks then you get a silver medal that is printed on your certificate if you get more than 90 between 90 and 100 you get a gold medal printed on your certificate we also have categories for toppers in the course depending on the number of people certified in the course we also have toppers so it could be up to 1 topper, 2 toppers 5 toppers, 1 percent topper 2 percent topper and so on so if you are a topper in the course there will also be one seal that comes on the certificate which says that you are a topper in the course now let's go to some numbers on how NPTEL has been growing over the last couple of years like I said this NPTEL certification effort was started in 2014 in that year we just did 3 courses the total enrollment was 1 lakh and 3000 people registered for the exams and that is where we were but if you look at 2022 which is last year you can see we offered more than 1200 courses 40 lakh enrollment overall and we had 7.58 lakh exams this is for 2 semesters of 2022 but basically it is good to see that NPTEL has been becoming popular amongst the various learner basis which is students in colleges, faculty members in colleges, working professionals, people who wish to upskill and reskill among all segments these certification courses from NPTEL definitely seems to be catching up and people seem to be learning and benefiting from this initiative ok what are the kind of courses that we offer if you go to any popular MOOCs portal you will see that many times they only offer the very popular courses they don't offer all courses in all disciplines for instance if there are maybe only 10 people taking up a particular course they may not be offering it because they do not have a subsidy model NPTEL has the advantage that the ministry of education is funding us for this entire project because of which we are even able to offer very specialized courses courses at the PhD level where there might be only a small number of takers for the course and so on and hence as you can see we have courses in every single discipline of engineering that are definitely offered as well as humanities, management a little bit of law courses and medical sciences, health sciences courses so as you can see there are about 683 courses in the mechanical engineering division 662 in the computer science 668 in the electrical engineering and so on the numbers all given here but you can see the variety of courses that we offer in every discipline so I think we are very confident if somebody comes to the portal I think they will definitely find a couple of courses that they would like to learn if you are in engineering it is a 100% match I would say you will find something new something interesting something which is knowledge of technology something that is absolutely current that you will be able to learn and even if you are not an engineering person the number of courses we offer in the management and humanity side is very very vast for instance we have courses that teach you German language there are 3 paths to a German 1, German 2, German 3 then we have Sanskrit language course we have a Japanese language course and then we have courses on soft skill training spoken English, business English there is technical English for a genius course that goes on there are courses on marketing management on entrepreneurship there is financial management basic commerce that is there there is something on IP and patents so these are very generic that kind of cut across domains anybody can actually study in fact we have courses on appreciating karnatic music appreciating Hindustani music and all which again you know attract a very different kind of a learner base so if you come to svayam portal and actually visit NPTEL courses I think we can kind of be assured that everybody will have something that they would like to study from it there must be something for you that interests you the best part about NPTEL is you can learn anything you want you are not restricted by your domain or whatever your current role or profession is for instance if you are a mechanical engineering student and you want to learn say programming courses and you want to learn data science courses that may not be part of your curriculum you can come to NPTEL and you can study all of that or maybe you are aspiring to be an electrical engineer but for maybe because of your rank and because of your marks you only got say metallurgical engineering but you can actually study electrical engineering courses from NPTEL whatever interests you and you can get a cross domain expertise also so in that way in NPTEL we don't enforce prerequisites for you we do say that this course will be easy for you but if you think you can manage and you can learn and you have the interest and motivation I would say that definitely you can go for any of the courses that we offer for learning purposes the other good thing about it is you can also see the kind of institutes that we work with primarily of course there are 8 coordinating institutes the older IITs which started NPTEL in 2003 so it is IIT Madras IIT Kanpur, IIT Kharagpur IIT Roorkee, IIT Bombay IIT Gauhati, IASC and IIT Delhi so we also reach out to other institutes where there are very good faculty in respective areas and we invite them to offer courses hence you can see that we have the newer IITs also pitching in for courses which are IIT Roper, IIT Mandi, IIT Patna the triple IITs are offering courses under NPTEL ICERS are offering courses under NPTEL you can see it all here and we also partner the National Institute of Epidemiology IMSC is there and you can also see the other schools here the National Law School of India University has some courses based on law and we also have a couple of courses from faculty who teach in institutes abroad which is outside of India so you can see Texas A&M you can see KTH Royal Institute of Technology Sweden, TU Berlin we have had faculty from there also teach NPTEL courses the type of courses we offer this is very important especially if you are a first time learner to NPTEL there are two types of courses that we offer for certification we call some of them as a new course and some of them as a re-run course so a new course is a course that we are offering for the very first time in a particular semester so the faculty would have proposed it and it is being offered on the SWIM platform for the first time while a re-run course is a course we have offered previously we have done exams previously and we are just repeating the videos again the assignments and exams of course will be new but the video content will primarily be the same and we re-offer the course in the subsequent semesters so the advantage of a re-run course is that the videos are already available on the NPTEL website sample assignments will be available on the NPTEL website the statistics of how the course did available on the NPTEL website so you can probably go there you can kind of see what the videos are about whether the videos are for a level that you can cope and you are interested in you can look at the nature of the statistics there how many people actually enrolled registered certified and so on who are the toppers whether your college had any student participation in it and that kind of data also you get access to and then you can decide whether you want to go in for a re-run course always enrol and not register for exams but if you are kind of deciding on what to do I would say first time learners try out re-run courses because you have access to all this content and data new courses we have to see how it runs when we offer it how students find the level of the course whether it is easy whether it is difficult so even we do not know till the semesters over so if you know how NPTEL works maybe you have done 5 or 6 NPTEL courses so far then a new course is very easy for you but if you are a first time learner if you are coming from a college doing NPTEL for the first time we would really suggest that you do re-run courses and as you can see in the July semester we have 583 re-run courses while 108 are new courses so you have a wide range from which you can pick a course that has already been offered in the past like I was also saying we have 3 durations of courses that are possible 4 week course and 8 week course and a 12 week course so a 12 week course is like a full semester course so we do not have 14 or 16 weeks 12 weeks is the maximum that NPTEL does the 12 week courses go over a span of 3 months and they will delve into the topics to a great depth the 4 week courses are more like either introductory courses or there will be some niche research topics or maybe some short topics that are being dealt with and 8 week courses are just 2 month courses moderately so depending on again if you are a first time MOOCs learner if you are first time coming to an NPTEL certification course then maybe you want to try out a 4 week course because 4 weeks will go just like that you enroll week 1 week 2 week 3 week 4 you are done the course is over well a 12 week course goes on for much longer so you might want to try with a 4 week course first and then proceed on to a 12 week course but of course the maximum number of courses we are offering in a semester nowadays is 12 week course this is just to give you some data on what is happening with the NPTEL exams now that we have been running exams for about 9 years what is the attendance percentage what is the past percentage are people passing the courses that we are offering for certification because many learners when we talk to for the first time they always have this fear that these courses are from the IITs other institutes can I actually learn from it will I be able to understand what is being taught IITs are not for me they get scared of even attempting and trying a course that we are offering but I will tell you that the feedback over the last 9 years has been that if you are sincere and you watch the videos you try out the assignments and you spend time right anybody can learn any of the courses that are offered there is nothing that stops you from actually learning and studying well from a course if you put in the time and the effort a lot of students who have never ever even attempted an IIT course have done multiple courses from us are today NPTEL stars and they are doing very well in terms of their next steps in life which might be higher education or which might be a better career opportunity or an internship or whatever else they were aspiring to with through doing NPTEL courses so typically our attendance percentage in the exams has been in recent times at least very steady at about 88 to 90 percent we have been hitting 90-90 except for probably the COVID time that we did in 81 but otherwise we have been standard at about 88 to 90 percent attendance and the past percentage has in recent times been around 67 to 70 percent so in between we had a small policy change on how we wanted to have the certification criteria hence the DIP you see for the last four or five semesters we have been doing about 67 to 70 percent past percentage and the gender split has been a constant at 4060, 40 female and 60 male which is very very good considering that primarily a lot of engineering colleges are participating in the NPTEL program and seeing a 4060 is actually very very refreshing and encouraging for us too we asked learners why they take up NPTEL courses for certification and this is the kind of reasons that they give us a lot of them have been doing it for say getting a job or an internship because on your resume when you put saying I have done maybe two or three courses from their NPTEL platform and the certificates are from the IATs and you show your certificate which possibly has good marks and you have studied well it is a definite crack through for the interview right the first thing is the recruiters will notice that you have done something additional and extra premier institutes and second when they ask you questions if you answer it well it's a definite win for you that you will land up an internship or a job so that is something that people have said research purposes many many learners scholars across the India and outside too they look out for what is happening on the research front and many of our courses that we offer up by faculty who are doing research that they also want to showcase their area there so that is something that learners are doing for research purposes the largest bucket for us of course is the credit transfer so today the choice based credit system is implemented in most colleges universities across India and UGC has UGC and AICT have approved up to 40% credit transfer from the SWIM platform into the regular curriculum of course the academic council has to approve the norms on how it is done but basically credit transfers permitted from SWIM courses and hence NPTEL courses also into the students transcripts so the largest bucket that we get saying why learners do NPTEL courses is for credit transfer in fact you can see that for the January 2023 semester 3.46 lakh learners have said that they are doing it for credit transfer then of course there is preparing for competitive exams for gate exams NPTEL courses are very very good because many of the core courses that we offer actually will form the backbone of the gate exam syllabus so if you do this it definitely helps you prepare for gate exam and also other competitive exams that happen your foundations will definitely be strengthened and then to learn about how MOOCs work a lot of faculty also today are interested in offering MOOCs so they also come into these courses to see how we offer the MOOCs that is there and of course the final is always the bottom line I think so that is to update themselves about knowledge to learn more and to explore new areas I think that is why people come into NPTEL this is something I want to highlight for learners doing NPTEL certification courses this is something new that we have started I already mentioned it at the beginning so we have started these weekly live sessions where there is a part teaching part solving of some old assignment in a course along with live interaction with learners doubt clearing that we are doing in about 280 to 300 courses every semester so there are these PMRF scholars in many institutes who have to teach as part of their PMRF mandate and they are doing these live sessions so every week there will be a two hour live session where they will teach and solve assignments and clear your doubts we really urge and request learners that please attend these live sessions and take the maximum benefit out of it but at least watch the recording much later so that you know how to solve problems because a lot of NPTEL courses has theory content in the videos but all the assignments will be problem based you need to really know how to work out problems so that you can solve the assignment problems exams will also have a lot of problem solving the feedback for these sessions has been very good in last two semesters people say they have benefited a lot and interactions were very helpful that is something that the learners have been telling us and hence we are continuing with this initiative in this particular semester also this part of the video is a very interesting section because we are going to look at the learners in the NPTEL certification for the last so many years the different varieties of learners we have the categories of recognition we have in NPTEL I would really like to highlight that and this is a section that at the NPTEL office at least we get very excited and enthused and motivated to do more by seeing how learners are adapting and adopting NPTEL courses for furthering their goals so we have been offering courses since 2014 and we found that there were many learners who started doing multiple courses with us it is not like they did one or two courses and said it is enough with NPTEL but people came back for repeat offerings and there are people who have done more than 40 or 50 courses with us and so on so this is the kind of data that I want to show in the coming slides we hope this will also be a motivation for learners when you see other learners do multiple courses and through the various categories that we have recognition and to say that I also want to be a part of that category and kind of learn and benefit from NPTEL so when we started seeing the kind of courses that learners are doing and how many courses they are doing we came up with 7 categories of stars that we have been having for the last 3 years currently ok so let me just describe these briefly for now so we have something called NPTEL domain scholars we have NPTEL superstars we have NPTEL evangelists NPTEL motivated learners NPTEL enthusiasts NPTEL discipline stars and NPTEL believers and you can see that the numbers are not in the tens of the hundreds but they are in the thousands right so this is the number of star learners I will talk more about the categories in the coming slides but just looking at the numbers right you can see that the growth of numbers in every category has been quite good over the last 3 or 4 years so NPTEL domain scholars they were only 8 in 2019 but now you can see every semester we are getting about 130 to 140 domain scholars same thing the superstars has been around 50 every semester discipline stars has doubled it was like 600 500 and so on the last 2 or 3 semesters but this semester we have gone on to about a thousand that is here so it looks like people are also recognizing that there are these categories where they can actually shine and be a part of and they are working towards it to become an NPTEL star so the first part let's talk about domain certification ok so when we started seeing how learners study we saw that they were doing NPTEL courses multiple NPTEL courses but when we put all the courses together we were not getting any area of expertise so though they would have maybe 6 certificates and so on from NPTEL it was not all belonging to an area it was very scattered so we said why not guide the learners a bit more and tell them that these set of courses actually belong to this sub domain these set of courses belong to sub domain let us define the courses for them and if they complete that set of courses then we give them a separate certificate so that's how domains were born so domain helps to prepare for higher education because people who completed get an expertise in an area so we are hoping that there will be better career prospects or when they go in for master's interviews you know master's education PhD education interviews they will do much better in that so how do you do a domain there is a set of core courses in every domain and then there are set of elective courses in a domain so you have to go and first do the core courses and once you completed you do the elective courses that are defined there though the pass mark for an NPTEL course is only 40 out of 100 for a domain the average mark that you have to take across all courses in the domain is more than 60 and in every course you have to have at least 55 and above so we up the criteria a bit more if you are to become a domain scholar and we suggest that the time period to finish a domain is about 3 years so 6 semesters so typically every domain has about 5 to 7 courses that you have to complete so even if you do one core semester it's much easier for you to complete the domain in 3 years so we are saying that the courses are to be completed in 3 years so that is something that is there and as a guideline we are saying maybe as students come into college if they start from their second year over second year or third year and even fourth year they can possibly finish the domain itself so you can see the kind of domains we have defined in the various disciplines of engineering this is just a sample there is much more details available on the website under our sub site called domains in computer science we have the artificial intelligence domain data science domain programming domain the foundations of computing systems domain in civil you can see a construction materials technology structural analysis structural design environment electrical we have ELSI design communication signal processing and so it goes here are more details that we have given here all the domains that we have so far listed here you can see we have domains in aerospace engineering biotechnology bio science chemical engineering humanities there is also very interesting domain in the faculty specifically designed for faculty members in colleges so we call it fundamental and advanced and this basically has a lot of courses that are related to the NAC and MBA ratings and the effective teaching practices about patents about the university system and so on so there are a lot of courses that are designed around what would be relevant for faculty in colleges to take and we see many faculty actually doing these domains as part of their NPTEL learning that is there then management you see that there are many domains such as marketing operations patents and IP economics and so on mathematics we have one and then you have the bigger departments so this is a sample domain certificate you can see that there are more details in the domain as compared to an NPTEL certificate it has of course your photo your name it will give the name of the domain that you have completed but we also list the courses that you have taken as part of the domain along with the QR code to verify each and every course as that you have taken as part of the domain so many times we get questions on should I apply for a domain should I inform you that I am doing a domain or something from the learners there is no such separate registration for a domain as you complete courses at the end of every semester we run our scripts to find out whether anybody has satisfied all the courses of every single domain and we also inform you saying that you have completed a domain so in fact many times at the beginning of every semester we run this for all the learners we have done 2 or 3 courses in a domain but they are not aware that it is part of a domain we also inform them saying hey you have done these 3 courses it is part of this domain why don't you complete the other courses and get a domain certificate so there is no separate registration from your site or cost for this it is just something that we run we aggregate and put all the courses together and see whether you have completed a domain from our site and very interesting stats on people completing domains normally the NPTEL courses are not easy they are technically rigorous there is a lot of problem solving they are very you know deep there is a lot of detailing that goes into the courses and so on so we didn't really expect that so many people would complete so many domains so it is very very heartening and motivating to see this kind of data so one domain completed of 572 learners so far 2 domains 32 learners have completed but then the next part is there are 4 people have 3 domains and one person who has completed 4 NPTEL domains so far there is a data as of June 2023 so it is really nice to see this and I think this should motivate so many others to take up domain certification these are the domains that have been completed we are just giving you the timeline over which the domains have been completed the highlight and yellow as you can see the maximum number of domain completions have happened in data science and the programming domains which are the job securing domains at some level you can see if you complete this you will be really technically strong when you are going for interviews in these areas one out one are faculty members who have completed the faculty advanced domain that is there and the next popular one seem to be marketing and patent and intellectual property right so that is something that again a lot of faculty and other people are doing as domains and if you want to know who the learners are who have completed the 4 and 3 domains so far it is a student and 4 of them are faculty members from various colleges across the country that have completed the domain details are also given here typically how many semesters do learners take to complete a domain what we have seen from our experience is that people normally plan for about 3 or 4 semesters so like I said most domains have about 5 to 7 courses so if you are doing one course a semester and you want to go slow you want to do it well that is one way to do it so that in about 6 semesters you can actually finish a domain some of them also managed to do 2 courses or 3 courses in a semester that is where you can see that 46 of them have finished domains in 2 semesters 2 of them have gone really aggressive the first row right number of semesters 1 where they have finished a domain these people have just taken all courses in one single semester and cleared it and gotten a domain that is going to be really stressful I am not sure we would recommend it but if you see the 3 semesters 4 semesters numbers 141, 228 and 143 people doing it I think that is a very reasonable way of doing a domain so you can plan for it from your 2nd year of college and kind of complete a domain in your 2nd, 3rd 4th year of college if you are in engineering so that should be a very comfortable way of actually completing a domain and these are the stars that we are coming up again I just wanted to remind you the next category we are going to look at is the Superstars category so this is again a very special category where the learners actually register for at least 4, 5 or 6 exams in a semester the max you can do is typically 6 so they register for 4, 5 or 6 exams in a semester and they don't just pass it but they are top it in at least 3 exams so these are people who really are working hard and kind of doing the courses really really well in a semester and doing many courses in a particular semester so that is this Superstar category that we have and evangelists are people who have been with us for 8 semesters or 4 years continuously without a break doing exams every single semester so they have to at least be present in 18 exams in 4 years and passed 2 third of those that is at least what we are seeing in terms of how the learner is with NPTEL and you can see the other categories here so if you see the Superstars here many of them from all walks of life there are faculty, there are students there are employed, you can see where they are from here and as you can see here the one column says how many present like how many courses they have been present for, how many passed and how many they have been a topper up so the first row Ravi Ramahooja for instance has been present in 6 courses, passed 6 courses and topper in 5 of those courses which is no mean feat it's really an intense work and I think learners really deserve appreciation for the time and effort that they are putting in to learn, these are also students for students and colleges who say that even one course is very very difficult for me to kind of complete these are students from various colleges that are there, you can see they are from university, college of engineering, pharmaceutical science and so on who are doing multiple NPTEL courses in a semester and being toppers in many of those courses so this is also a number of course takers from NPTEL from when we started it in 2014 so you can see that the largest number is of course the one course takers so about 10 lakh people have done just one NPTEL course with us from 2014 till date but then if you look at say the 2, 3, 4, 5 which is a more normal kind of learning we would say are about totally 5 lakh people have done 2, 3, 4, 5 anywhere between 2 and 5 courses from NPTEL in the last couple of years but then if you see the numbers beyond that right there are people who we call as NPTEL fanatics these people typically have been studying with us continuously and in fact there is one learner who has done 50 NPTEL certification courses so far and there are a couple of them in 47, 46, 45, 44 and so on and these people continue to learn with us they are you know really taking the benefit out of NPTEL trying to learn all they can from the certification courses and these are the numbers that we are seeing here in terms of NPTEL learners the highest number of course takers in 4 semesters that we actually took out from July 21 to Jan 23 there are people who are doing 6, 6 courses every single semester for instance the first faculty member Professor Prashant has actually done 6 courses every semester he's done 24 in 4 semesters and there are many more who have done maybe 5 or 6 courses alternating in the last 4 semesters we recognize these NPTEL stars on our website there is a link called NPTEL stars on our website if you click on it we actually show all the categories the people belonging to those categories we also send them out t-shirts called NPTEL stars which they are very proud to actually wear in display we've met many of these stars when we have visited colleges for various events and they are very proud to say that they are NPTEL stars we have lot of testimonials from them on our website too that you can look for on YouTube we have some feedback from them and this is what we this is how we recognize our NPTEL stars so let's continue with the other initiatives NPTEL has surrounding the NPTEL certification courses so we have not stopped with just offering courses but we do smaller initiatives around it which we feel which actually benefit the learners with respect to you know their progress in either career or higher education in terms of like you can see what all initiatives we have here so we do we have some internship opportunities we do soft skill training for learners who don't have that experience from say their own college we partner with companies to provide more facilities for our learners and for companies to also learn and partner with us in various ways there is a translation effort that's going on like I had mentioned previously too and so on so we'll describe some of these a bit more in detail so that you get an idea and you can see how you can utilize any of these whichever is relevant to you so the first point is credit transfer we talked about it when we were discussing on why learners are choosing and adopting NPTEL certification courses so UGC and AICT had actually approved up to 40% credit transfer from SWIM courses into the transcript of the students so this is across say the art science universities the engineering universities and other kind of whatever institutions might be there this is a possibility that has been enabled by UGC and AICT so the academic councils of the respective universities of course have to approve saying how many credits they will permit to be transferred what is the modality of transferring the credits whether learners just enroll to NPTEL courses or SWIM courses and do assignments or do they also have to do the exams and bring back certificates all these will be defined by the academic councils of the respective universities autonomous colleges who are defining the policies but broadly up to 40% has been enabled so it's a good idea to do at least 2 or 3 courses from say platforms like SWIM whereby you can learn something which is different and maybe something that is not offered by your own college or your own institute we also have some recommendations for people who are evolving these policies based on our experience in the last couple of years so one of the things we say is do not make NPTEL or SWIM courses mandatory in the last semester of the degree program because many times for whatever reasons there might be a delay in the conduct of the exam or if the student is unable to pass the exam then it becomes a showstopper for getting the degree in graduating so typically in the final year of the degree program of the student it is better not to make it mandatory if the student is good enough and can cope up it is up to them if it is an option that is available to them it is much better but making a credit transfer mandatory in the last year I think I mean we all at NPTEL think may not be a good idea. Secondly when you induct students to start with NPTEL courses it is better to avoid the first semester as they come into college because the transition from school to college itself is a big change for students so it's good if we let them settle in maybe for a semester and from second semester they can start with NPTEL courses and the courses to start with also might be something like soft skills or training in English or maybe learning a language or some such because the idea of an online course what components it has what they have to do every week as part of the course may not be very clear to students so these kind of courses which are a little easier than the core technical courses might be a good idea to start the learners off on taking for credit transfer and then when the bucket of courses is defined for credit transfer it is better to keep it as large as possible and as open as possible because one of the ideas of you know allowing credit transfer is for students to be able to explore other areas of interest to see whether they would like to learn and maybe pursue some other line of interest through these MOOCs so they are already doing some set of courses in their regular program so these MOOCs should allow them to also explore what they cannot study as part of their regular program so keeping the bucket of courses much larger and open for the student to sell in credit might be a good idea and also allow the students to do the course first and then exercise a choice on whether they want to credit it because if they are not done well or maybe the marks have not come well then it's better maybe they don't want to credit it and they want to do the university course itself so students can first do the NPTEL course they can see the kind of marks and grades have gotten if they are happy with it they choose to do the credit transfer otherwise they opt for some other course that is possible and like I said it is good idea to allow the students to do courses which are job oriented which cut across disciplines like say science courses, programming courses English training courses, soft skill courses, communication courses and so on apart from of course the core and other elective courses which are a part of the program itself the second initiative that we would like to describe today is for the benefit of faculty members in colleges so here we would like to explicitly state that NPTEL has an MOU with AICT under which faculty who do advanced NPTEL courses can actually apply for an FDP certificate and convert these courses into FDP equivalent points that is something that NPTEL kind of worked out with AICT and we did an MOU so now there is an act which actually formalizes this from our side so every semester NPTEL will put out from among the courses that are being offered that semester they will also mark certain courses which says that these are available for faculty to take as FDP. The process to get an FDP certificate is the same as a regular learner faculty have to enroll to the courses on svayam, they have to do the weekly assignments, they have to register for the exam and they have to pass the exam as per the certification criteria for that course. Once they have passed it they can also apply for an additional FDP certificate apart from the NPTEL certificate that they will get. The format that you see on the screen is actually the format that we will be issuing to the faculty who complete such FDP courses on NPTEL. And the conversion mechanism that AICT has agreed upon with NPTEL is that a 4 week NPTEL course is taken as equivalent of half FDP of 1 week an 8 week NPTEL course is taken as a full FDP of 1 week and a 12 week NPTEL course is treated equivalent to a one and a half FDP and how can you identify the courses that are available for faculty to take as FDP so that is marked with the red colour there on the right side if you can see it in every course under the description if we have mentioned that this is an AICT approved FDP course that course can be completed in this manner they can apply for the certificate and get an FDP certificate. So in the July semester of 2023 you can see that out of 692 courses we are totally offering 581 courses are categorized as FDP courses you can also see some data here what is the faculty registration that we are seeing semester after semester typically 20% of those who enrolled to courses actually register for exams that is the conversion date with respect to faculty and out of that a subsection actually applies for FDP certificates on the Jan 2023 semester you can see that about 28400 faculty have applied for FDP certificates from NPTEL side so one doubt that many learners get because normally when you talk about an FDP program the audience can only be faculty so a question that comes is so these courses which are marked as for FDP can students and other people not enroll and learn from it it is not the case like that in NPTEL in NPTEL all courses are open for anybody who wants to enroll and learn there is no restriction on that except that if you are a faculty and you complete these courses that are tagged as FDP courses you can get an additional certificate on top of the NPTEL certificate which you can use for CAS points when you are going in for promotion interviews that is the difference but otherwise anybody can enroll to any of these courses and they can learn from it the third initiative we want to talk about is about 2 years old now so NPTEL like we said has a lot of content which is more than 3000 courses under its repository on the website free for everybody to access and the kind of courses that we have any or most of them are foundational level courses that is all the core courses of the BTEC degree programs in various engineering disciplines the PG programs that we have all the core courses are actually covered there and these courses were being accessed by many students in preparing for gate exams but then the courses had lectures scattered all over and they were not organized in a manner that was easy to find for a learner who was preparing for gate so one of the where we actually categorize and kind of list all the lectures that are relevant to topics given in the gate syllabus for each discipline and kind of point learners to say go through these videos these will help you get the foundations for these topics of the gate syllabus that is what we wanted to do so here are some things that we have done we have linked the gate syllabus topics to the lectures course wise video wise we have said go through this for learning this that is the first part we have done the second one we have all the gate question papers from the past created additional questions on top of it and we are now offering mock tests every Sunday where the learners can come in do a mock gate exam and we also release a marks that they get along with a leader board for it the third one is we have created video solutions for the questions in the gate papers for the last 10 years or so in various disciplines so there are videos that clearly show you how to solve these problems which have appeared in the gate question papers of the last few years and the last part is live mentoring sessions, live tutoring sessions, live doubt clearing sessions we offer a couple of sessions every week for every discipline where there are these PMR of scholars who are coming in teaching and those who are preparing for gate can actually attend those sessions if you have any doubts you can get it cleared by them and you can also discuss with them on any other clarifications that you require so these are the ways in which we have prepared the gate portal and these are the ways in which anybody who is aspiring to write the gate exam can actually prepare through NPTEL please note all of this is free of cost there is no cost there is no fee for you to pay to access any of these contents be it the mock test, be it the tutoring and live sessions that we conduct be it accessing the video solutions for the gate question papers, previous gate question papers or just checking the syllabus to the videos the four types that we have you can see that we don't charge any fee for any of it and the numbers are given here of how many sessions we have, how many videos we have you can also go through that the gate portal is given at the top it is called gate.nptel.ac.n please go there check out the content we have if you have any suggestions do let us know we will try to see whether we can incorporate that also here is some feedback from learners who use the gate portal and actually wrote the gate exam and it seems like the way that we have organized the content is very useful for the learners and that is what we are seeing here when they give us feedback the next initiative that we'd like to describe here we call it NPTEL plus it is an add-on on the NPTEL portal that we have be it the repository or the certification courses that we run the certification courses we run like we said we do it in the January semester and July semester so there are fixed start dates there are fixed end dates there are fixed exam dates if you miss that you have to come back to the next time we offer the courses it is not like I have a requirement in the month of June and can I go and get myself certified from NPTEL through svayam it is not currently possible but then we were getting many requests where people said we want any time certification can you please enable it so that was one driving force and we also saw that many external portals which are not connected with NPTEL have taken NPTEL content and they are offering it on their portals for a high fee and also giving certificates to learners from their side so we thought that instead of that being done I think NPTEL should do it that was the kind of you know basic that we brought in for this NPTEL plus portal so NPTEL plus portal is more like a portal where additional learning can be done apart from just the regular courses so there are two or three parts to this portal that we have so the first part is we have self-paced courses okay so these are the differences between NPTEL and NPTEL plus so NPTEL can run only senate approved academy courses which are normally taken for credit transfer their audience is students and faculty members and colleges the courses are a fixed durations for 8-12 weeks and with so much of content like we said exam dates are fixed we run the courses only once or twice in the year in the Jan or July semester and enrollment is free exam has a fee and it's open to anyone no restriction on numbers so this is what we already saw in the previous introduction to NPTEL but NPTEL plus is different where you can offer any type of training program it can be a short-term training program of just 2 hours it can be up to 4 hours it can be up to 8 hours it can be 2 days 3 days 5 days 10 days it is a variable duration program depending on the nature of the content being taught the duration varies the audience is also inclusive of a lot of industry professionals keeping their requirements in mind we are also doing the NPTEL plus platform of course augmenting the skills of learners and the faculty here that is something that we try to do through NPTEL so in NPTEL plus there is also self-paced programs there are live programs live workshops short-term training long-term training it could be anything and the certification criteria is not as rigid as for these ones they can offer it it is flexible in that sense all programs are paid here they are self-sustaining in some sense and the fee differs based on the program based on the topic who are audiences the fee also varies for each the numbers normally are kept limited or they are kept open depending again on the nature of the interaction and nature of the program being offered so these are some of the workshops that we have completed between December 22 and Jan 23 so you can see the variety of topics that we have been able to offer these are just samples we have many many more workshops we have heard data visualization with R there is data science applications in drug discovery and genomics then there is something for faculty to say re-energizing the classroom through the use of gamification there is machine learning techniques in biology then introduction to biomimicry then there is Indian democracy so you can see the variety of courses and workshops that we have been offering here through NPTEL plus some other topics here are open source tools cyber security, social computing additive manufacturing and so on so this is one part of NPTEL plus where we conduct short term training programs and workshops for learners to enroll and benefit from the other aspect of NPTEL plus is the self-paced portal where we have currently about 250 NPTEL courses that are made available but here the enrollment to the courses has a fee to enroll it is not free like we do in svayam but you can enroll any time of the year to a certification course there are assignments that are given here and there is a criteria for fulfilling with respect to exam registration here so you have to complete every assignment with a 50% cutoff so that is something that we do here it is not best 3 out of 4 or best 4 out of 6 but it's every single assignment that you have to complete scoring more than 50 marks in each of it then you become eligible for the examination the exams are conducted online proctored they are not in person but they are online proctored and the exams are conducted every week so you can potentially enroll to a course you can maybe complete the course in about a weeks time say you go through the videos you do the assignments you clear the cutoff of the assignments and within next week you can take up the exam and get a certificate from NPTEL on this so this is the any time certification portal of NPTEL which is what is called NPTEL plus so NPTEL plus has self-paced courses NPTEL plus under that we offer workshops we offer short-term programs we offer a little long-term programs maybe like 3 months and so on and we also offer third-party programs so industry professionals have come in and they have offered courses on their behalf there are many of it going like that there are third-party programs like those offered by Nailit for say their labs their labs and so on so those are something that we also partner and advertise with our audience those are third-party programs so these are the kind that we do on NPTEL plus and it's a paid e-learning portal of NPTEL the next initiative is very interesting we think for learners especially who are looking out for pursuing higher education after doing whatever they are currently so this is something that we started in 2018 this is internships for toppers in the NPTEL certification courses so the basic process that we do here is we reach out to the faculty who have offered the NPTEL certification course and we ask them whether they would like to take a few interns during the summer or the winter and if they consent to this then we write to the toppers in the course and we tell them that here is an opportunity for you so and so faculty has agreed to take interns please send us your resume and your statement of purpose on why you want to do that internship and these are passed on to the faculty who then decides and finalizes from among the applicants who are the interns they would like to take normally the internship nowadays we are stressing that it be in-person at the institute so that these learners also get a feel of the lab that is going on there the research were going on at the institute they get a chance to stay at the institute possibly interact with the scholars who are there with the faculty who are there and so on so more and more faculty are also preferring that the interns come in person and do the internship in person but there are a few online internship opportunities also going around as part of this there is a stipend for the intern who goes over and stays in person at an institute to cover their costs of travel and stay there and there is a certificate that is given to the intern at the end of the internship if they completed successfully and the faculty also agrees that the work done was up to the mark so far we have been targeting so many interns we are hoping to really increase these numbers in the upcoming semesters so we have tried to do about 200 interns this time in January 2023 and we hope that this will increase to 300 400 in the upcoming semesters so if you are doing an NPTEL certification course please remember there might be an opportunity to get an internship under the professor who has offered the course and this could be a very good chance for you all to further your learning in that area and also work with them try to explore new areas that are happening within the institute and also get new opportunities for interaction this is one more unique opportunity that we have partnered with a company that has been who has agreed to offer internships based on NPTEL courses that the learners complete so TI has actually partnered with NPTEL to provide summer internship opportunities for NPTEL learners the courses that are given here are basic electrical circuits and analog circuits or analog IC design if learners do any two of these three courses then they will be eligible to interview for internship positions by TI and TI will be extending internship opportunity in the summer of the third year and if they are happy with the student they are also looking at extending pre placement offers to such students there is also one more set of courses they are looking at circuit analysis for analog designers time varying electrical networks and so on if you complete any of this then these students will be given additional preference on top of those who finish category 1 so this is something that we have partnered with TI so if there are students and learners in the electrical engineering discipline please watch out for this see whether you have completed these courses if you have then inform us and try for this internship position industry associate so NPTEL also sees value that many industry professionals working professionals are enrolling to NPTEL certification courses and benefiting from it and it's also that many times the employee wants to formally also engage the employees into the NPTEL certification courses and companies can also help absorb NPTEL learners by means of internship and recruitment if they have job openings for them in certain areas and we can also give them the list of people who have skillsets in those areas CSR is another area that we work with industry associates technical talks leadership talks on the current research and technology that happens that is something that the companies again do if there is employee time available then we do something called mock interviews for NPTEL learners so there are multiple ways in which we engage with companies all across and currently we are partnering with 87 companies and these are called NPTEL industry associates NPTEL has an MOU with them which kind of outlines all the positive collaborations that are there and the company can choose to do one or more of that and interact with NPTEL so these are some of the companies that we have MOUs with you can see that they span the various areas which includes manufacturing which includes energy like NLC India, there are IT companies like IBM and Infosys and there are companies also like there are startup companies that are also partnering with us there is Mahindra and Mahindra the automotive companies, Tejas networks is in the electrical field and so on so there are companies from various domains that are partnering with NPTEL these are more here for your peruses so these are companies that we are working with and they partner with us in various ways like I mentioned earlier the next initiative that NPTEL brought about because many times when we interacted and we had forwarded the resumes of NPTEL learners to companies that were looking out for hiring people one thing that we found that was even though the NPTEL learners had good certifications and marks from us they were unable to communicate very clearly and express themselves very clearly and that's where we saw the lack of soft skill training and confidence in such learners so we came up with an initiative where we have a set of soft skill trainers on board with us and we reach out to local chapters the colleges that partner with us and we say that if they have a batch of say 30 students who require soft skill training we'd be happy to extend that again totally free of cost NPTEL does it just for its partners which are the local chapters and these could be 7 day trainings 14 day training that we put the students through in these trainings they do employability assessment tests they do online mock interviews they do group discussions they also get a half an hour one on one time with the soft skill trainer so there they get inputs only for them on how they are presenting on how they are communicating which areas they have to improve on how does their resume look and so on so these students also do one on one with the soft skill trainers to get specific inputs the numbers in terms of what we have done about 244 colleges we have completed soft skill training so far and who are partnered with us and some numbers here the interactive group session had about 7000 people who participated overall so far and HR mock interview one on one 4286 have been undergoing from our side impact of soft skill training we have found that the students who went through the soft skill training definitely their confidence was much much better when they went in for interviews and they also got a lot of tips from the soft skill trainers and these are feedback which says that it helped them in actually preparing and presenting themselves to potential recruiters or for anybody else who was interviewing them this is something that we do for again local chapters the colleges that partner with us so we see that many students come in from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and even the rupees 1000 that we charge as a course exam fee seems to be very high for them and this fee kind of becomes a blocker for them to give the NPTEL exam so though they might be studying very well they might be very interested this fee becomes a blocker for them to give the exam hence to remove this obstacle of a fee stopping them from getting an NPTEL certificate NPTEL has been approaching companies since 2015 and appealing to the CSR division saying that if they can extend a 50% fee waiver on the rupees 1000 to such students it would really help these students gain certificates and also build their resume sharpen their skills and become more job ready so this has been something that we have been doing and there are a couple of companies that have been helping us as listed here so initially it was Addison Technologies that was a very big donor for us now it is followed by GABS Technology, Southern Global Services Tata Technologies has provided a CSR support, ANSI Software Texas Instruments India Ananta Technology and there are individual donors also who give for this particular bucket we are very thankful to all of these people for supporting our students who are coming from such economically disadvantaged background so the way that we administer this is that students have to pay the rupees 1000 and write the exam and pass it once they have done that the local chapter college will make a list of students who require this fee waiver and pass it on to NPTEL they will collect the proof they will do the background check and give us the final list NPTEL will then pass on a 50% refund to these students who have passed the courses so that is how we are administering this particular scholarship on exam fees through CSR support from the companies and for companies watching this this CSR is given to IIT Madras and will be given ATG certificates the utilization certificates are given we will also give the report of how the money was distributed where all it went it is a pan India initiative because students are all across India and that's where this 50% scholarship will be distributed from our side so that is for companies anybody watching and who wants to partner with CSR on this this is the paperwork that we will give from our side and as you can see we have distributed these fee waivers for about 1.4 lakh students so far in the last 7 years but with the growing number of learners who are writing NPTEL certification exams whatever we have is never enough so we appeal to anybody saying that we will be very happy to get back any contribution from your side that we can pass on to such students to write NPTEL exams this is the feedback from student beneficiaries as you can see here and these students even that 500 rupees we give back becomes like a seed for them to come back for the next exam and do more courses with us we have stories of students who are first generation learners whose parents are daily wage labourers whose parents are actually rickshaw alas and so on who have done NPTEL courses and benefited through these fee waiver that is provided by from the CSR funds and they have actually gotten seats into higher education institutes because of enabling this particular waiver so you can also see the distribution across the states here on the right side you can see that about students in 300 colleges have benefited through this CSR fee waiver and it is all across India that your support goes to. The next initiative is a bigger part of NPTEL it is almost like a mainstream content that is now happening in NPTEL so this is a translation effort that we have been doing in the last couple of years so we have been doing this effort from about 2020 now and we have completed about 20,000 hours of content totally across so many languages so you can see that 224 unique courses are translated into different sets of languages so far and almost 20,000 hours of translated content is available on NPTEL website and there is also work that is ongoing we are adding more number of courses to this bucket to be translated and we hope that much more will be delivered in this year which is 2023 and 2024 the languages that we are looking to translate into are listed here also there are 11 languages that we are getting but the most popular is of course Hindi we try to do most courses getting translated into Hindi followed by of course Tamil Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada Gujarati, Bengali and so on so if you all are faculty members in colleges and you teach any of the courses which is on our translation list and you are very comfortable with your regional language which is any of these 11 please to get in touch with the NPTEL office so that we can also check whether it is eligible as a translator and we will assign work to you so we require a large pool of resources and manpower to do this translation effort because the software that automatically do it are still not up to the mark that they don't give you perfect translation so we get a first cut from the ML models that are being developed now but we do need a human to actually check what is being translated, what is the output, make corrections on it readable to the end user so for that we require technical trained manpower which ideally can be the faculty in the colleges who teach these courses, who know the content in these courses, know the local language also and will be able to help us in this translation effort so if you are interested please reach out to the NPTEL office and we will assign work to you so where all can you find these translated content right how do you access the translated content that is something that we also want to show you because we have translated so much content but whether the end users actually know where it is and how to access it is something that we are not sure about hence here I would like to spend a few minutes to show you where this translated content can be accessed so there are a few places the one is on YouTube we have uploaded the translated content as subtitles and you can change the subtitle language on the YouTube video you can toggle between the various languages available and you can watch it there that is the first part the second part YouTube is also bringing out a beta version currently it is in beta currently where you can upload audio tracks in different languages and you can also toggle the audio tracks to listen to whatever audio you want so we can have dubbed videos now for NPTEL videos where the language is regional Indian languages the third part on the Swayam platform below the video there is a box where the transcript is put in and there you have a drop down language bar if you change the language there the language in which you see it inside the swayam course also changes the fourth part that you can actually find this content is on the NPTEL website below the video that you see inside any course there is also a text transcript box there too you can change the language and you can read the transcript in different Indian languages we also have saved each of these translated versions as PDFs in various languages we have put them together as books that you can download hence say for example we have books which are introduction to research in Marathi introduction to research in the introduction to research in Tamil and so on these are full fledged books that we have done we have put together all the lectures into one single PDF if indexed with page numbers and so on and you can download that and you can also view that so these are the places where you can find the different translated content on either swayam portal on NPTEL portal or the YouTube videos all these have it and we would really request people using this content in local languages to give us some feedback on whether this is useful to you all have you used it what is the quality of the translation so that we also know where we have to improve and what we have to do for the same so requesting you all to please give a feedback check out the translated content and let us know whether it is useful for you or how to do it better the next initiative that we would like to touch upon is something called lab workshop so when we were offering courses for certification through NPTEL a lot of requests came in saying all of this is theory where are the hands on component so that's when we went back to institutes and we said can we utilize the labs that we have in these institutes during summer and winter typically when the institute students are not in the labs there and use it at that time for the NPTEL learners so we came up with this model where typically a lab workshop is a one week workshop Monday to Friday every day there are two experiments that is conducted there are also technical talks lectures and visits to other labs that are done during these five days so that learners who come to the institute are exposed to the facilities in that particular institute on Saturday we run a lab exam for that particular five days of content whatever was done and then we give a certificate for the lab workshop typically these can be taken as a one credit course if the academic council approves it again we subsidize this entire lab workshop for NPTEL learners we only collect Rs 200 as the registration fee the accommodation and the food charges have to be borne by the student when they go in person to the institute so for instance say item address is conducting a lab workshop typically we will ensure all students attending the lab workshop have to come and stay in Madras we will try for hostile accommodation if possible within the institute if possible we will facilitate otherwise accommodation has to be taken care of students outside and so to food but they will be able to spend at least from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. 6 p.m. within the institute for about six days going through the various labs of IIT Madras meeting faculty here meeting research scholars you are doing experiments and so on which will be again a really good experience for people going through the lab workshops some of the lab workshops that we have done say in the last couple of months some of them are online but most of them are in person like we said so you can see electronic devices and characterization analog circuits and applications digital system design and verification using the a krypton board internet of things etc all these have been in person workshops at one of the institutes sometimes the workshop duration is six days it has been two days or it has been two weeks so this is the way that we conduct and you can see the participants also these are smaller groups they are much restricted it varies anywhere between 20 to 50 that we are able to accommodate in a batch here are social media handles NPTEL has a presence on LinkedIn it has a presence on Instagram, Twitter Facebook and the youtube community so we are available on all these five social media handles you can see the followers also here recently the last one year we have been very active on the social media putting out very good posts and memes and receiving very good feedback so thank you for the support and thank you for following us and thank you for encouraging us for all the posts that we are making there so if you follow our handles most of the information on the NPTEL projects are normally also put out here in terms of posts so you can know what is going on with NPTEL what are the new initiatives that are there and see if anything is interesting to you these are again two partnerships with companies that we have done we saw the TI partnership for internship but then this is for certification courses from these two companies so Microsoft offers Microsoft certification courses there are two types which is the basic office certification as well as a faculty led certification which also requires completion of a project and ANSYS is the company that has a lot of tools with students of say mechanical engineering or chemical engineering and so on should be very familiar with they have also come out to say that toppers in certain courses of NPTEL identified by them will be given a chance to go through the ANSYS certification tracks and get badges and these are free of cost there will be no cost for it they are sponsoring a certain number of badges which are normally costed outside because of NPTEL partnership they are saying that they can give it free that even such toppers can avail of this and actually get ANSYS course certification badges the same as with Microsoft more details will be shared with you during live sessions and through your colleges look out for such opportunities it is very good if you do something like this because these are industry certification programs and on your resume they definitely strengthen that you have done something outside of just technical theory courses so NPTEL local chapters is an initiative we started in 2015 when the certification was also started from our site we wanted a way in which we could partner with colleges because our primary audience for NPTEL is students in colleges and faculty in colleges hence we wanted a proper way in which we could partner with them so that firstly we could do information sharing that say NPTEL has so many courses these are for certification and to publicize these courses amongst the colleges we had to build a network so in 2015 we came up with this concept of establishing local chapters in colleges whereby they can partner with NPTEL so how does a college partner with NPTEL as a local chapter right so a local chapter is established in a college and hence all the people under that college come under the local chapter so it is students, it is faculty it is non-teaching staff everybody comes under that particular chapter so there is no requirement for and separate and individual registration by every member of the college again with NPTEL but as an umbrella the local chapter encompasses all the people under that particular college that is a part one secondly is there any money to be paid to NPTEL to become a local chapter absolutely no please be aware of this NPTEL does not collect any money for establishing local chapters in colleges this is completely free what we require from the local chapter or the college is a letter on the letter head of the head of the institution where the head says that we want to establish a local chapter in our college they give the details of the person who will be our single point of contact or a SPOC as we call so we need the name the department the email ID the mobile number of the person who will be acting as a SPOC so on that letter head letter we require these details also to be shared with us signed by the head of the institution so once the head of the institution says we wish to partner with NPTEL everybody under that local chapter in college actually comes as part of this partnership so there is no separate registration for anybody else from that particular institution is there any other facility required to be having a local chapter do we require a separate room do we require name boards do we require any infra absolutely not there is nothing required but in many colleges we have seen that in the library they have designated certain computers as having NPTEL content so the NPTEL content is being locally probably stored somewhere certain computers are given access to that server and you can access NPTEL content without going on the internet from that place in some colleges we have seen that NPTEL local chapter coordinator or some such a small board but that is mostly the room of the coordinator themselves it is not like there is a separate infrastructure that is required and is there a membership fee for the people who actually partner with NPTEL there is no membership fee also for the people under the college who become part of the local chapter so hope this is clear all we need is a letter from the head of the institution saying we wish to become a local chapter and giving us details of the person who will act as our contact within the institute as the single point of contact for the local chapter so one thing which we have been doing in the past even like 15 years is that if you all give us hard disk and say which disciplines of content we have to copy we can copy the entire NPTEL content and share it with you so that you can put it on your intranet on your local server so that say when thousand students are accessing NPTEL content if your college does not have enough bandwidth for them to go online and go to our website they can do it from your local server so that is something that we facilitate we actively copy the content and give it to you whatever you require and you do not have to take the entire content also for instance you are an arts science college and you do not have discipline such as mechanical engineering or chemical engineering you do not need those particular courses you can just tell us saying okay give me English mathematics give me physics chemistry computer science engineering maybe only these courses that come under this we would require so we will copy only that for you and we will send it on hard disk so the total content size that we have now is approximately 15 terabytes so whatever you require approximately you can give us that many hard disk we will copy it and give it to you again this is free of cost there is no cost to it no money to be paid to us for doing this it normally takes about one or two weeks depending on the number of institutes we are copying for once we are done we inform you you can come and collect it back so what is the advantage of becoming a local chapter why should a college become a local chapter can a college participate in NPTEL certification courses without actually establishing a local chapter so yes colleges can participate in Swayam and NPTEL courses without establishing local chapters there is no stopping anybody from learning for any of these courses but there are advantages if you become a local chapter so the very first and biggest advantage if you are a local chapter is the SPOC or the person who is nominated by an institute called the single point of contact has two logins to entire data of members from their local chapter participating in the courses so one is on the Swayam portal so when you go to swyme.gov.in and you log in if we designate you as the spark you will also get a drop down there called SPOC login so once you go to the SPOC login you can see the data of course wise how many people from your local chapter have enrolled to courses who are the people who are submitting assignments there is also a way in which you can assign faculty members as mentors for your own students so that you can also track the mentors to the students and they can actually ensure that these students are learning every week submitting assignments and so on so that is something that is available on the swyme portal for a SPOC there is also a login for the SPOC on nptel.ac.in slash local chapter website and here we give you much more information from our site so for instance of course you will again get the enrollment details of who all have enrolled to various courses but you will also get access to exam registration details who all have registered to exams once the hall tickets are received we will also share the hall tickets of all these candidates with you you will get access to that you will get access to the center information so if you want to arrange for some buses or transport to the exam centers on the exam day you can do that so that is there once the results are released the marks and the e-certificates of all the candidates under your local chapter are shared with you so you can directly use them for credit transfer of fdp points or as relevant within your institute that is one more thing then the local chapter rating plaques the mentor certificates SPOC certificates, star certificates all of these are made available inside your login so inside your login all this data is skipped over a period of time we do not delete it from semester to semester you will have access to all this data across from when you start your local chapter to the current date so even when say there are accreditation agencies that are visiting you like NAC or NBA and they ask you whether you are doing anything on svayam you can open your SPOC login and you can show them that these are the data within my login that NPTEL has shared and this is the participation from our side you can see all the certificates here and so on so the most important aspect of becoming a local chapter and having a SPOC is that you actually get access to data directly from our side that you can check, verify and use in whatever way is required on your side there are also additional benefits for becoming a local chapter so if your college is situated in a city where we currently do not do exams and you would like maybe you have more than say 200 students writing exams from your college you can approach us to establish an exam center in your city itself so that is something we will work with our exam partner we will see if it is possible and we will try to do it also it's not like we need 200 candidates only from your college you can talk to all the neighboring local chapters in your city and across the different local chapters in your city if we get this number also it is enough for us so that is something that you can interact with us and you can let us know if you want an exam center in your particular city the next advantage is that there is a mentor-mentee relationship possible on the svayam portal so once a faculty member is set as a mentor on the svayam portal and students tag themselves to the mentor the mentor can actually see the assignment marks of the students so when the assignment is open they can see whether they have submitted it or not after the deadline they will also get the assignment marks so how does this help or how does this really help the students or the college so basically say there are 1000 students who are doing different courses in a particular college so you can put one one mentor for say every 20 students or 30 students or 50 students and you can designate their email ideas as a mentor on the svayam portal you can ask all your students to tag themselves to the mentor and in the class the mentor can also follow up every week with that group of 30 or 50 students on whether they have watched the videos whether they have submitted the assignment if somebody is not submitting assignments and you know it's very important for credit transfer you can follow up with those students and so on so it's a very good feature if you're a local chapter to be using this faculty members nominated as mentors who can actually supervise the progress of their students and the third point that we have is the fee waiver from the CSR bucket we already spoke about how we extend fee waivers through the generous donation of companies that give it from the CSR buckets this we actually facilitate through local chapters so we actually ask local chapters with students from the college are coming from economically backward backgrounds and who will require this fee waiver so the spark and the principle of the local chapter actually nominate and give us the list and we pass on the refunds to that list so this is a help and trust that we put into the local chapter and we ask them to give us who is it that requires this support and just to reiterate direct sharing of learner data again with the spark and the college comes from us through your logins that you can use maybe for credit transfer or you can use for certificates of your faculty and so on that you can do other thing that we do for every single local chapter that partners with us is that we have a page on NPTEL website that is publicly accessible by anyone who searches for that particular college so here is a sample page we have given that's the name of the college the logo of the college is put there the spark details are given here and we also say since when we are partnering with them and below that you can see that there is a table kind of a format where we show every semester hominy students enrolled hominy students were present hominy of them passed whether they were toppers whether they were stars and so on so this is a publicly displayed information about every single local chapter that we work with so if a student is say generally browsing to see which colleges they might want to join and they are say googling some college name our page also gets ahead and they know that so on so college is very active with NPTEL there is an opportunity to do certification from NPTEL and IIT courses that might influence their decision in some way so this is a page that we publicly maintain for every single local chapter that partners with us another benefit that we try to extend to SPOCs because they are the most important piece in our partnering with colleges taking information from our site the learners in the colleges be it students and faculty getting together the entire community for learning from NPTEL courses they are submitting their study time so many times we have seen that colleges put NPTEL course learning into the timetable itself and 2 or 3 periods in a week is for students to learn NPTEL courses in some places where we have seen say 100 students are doing the same course they take them to a class they stream the content video content there is a local faculty member the faculty member answers explains and tries to solve the assignment with the student ensure that the students are also the person of contact for us who is the SPOC is very important for us because they get this ecosystem running inside the college for the students and the faculty to do the NPTEL certification courses so a small benefit that we try to extend from our site is we try to say that there is support available to the tune of rupees 25,000 for SPOCs who have papers in conferences in certain institute so that is something that we have shown they can apply to us every month and they can say that they have a paper if it kind of satisfy the norms that we have put down for support we support the registration to the conference their travel and accommodation so there is something that we have been saying and if the SPOC is not actively using it they can also nominate a faculty member to avail of this benefit so just to reiterate we do not collect any money from any local chapter on our site and all this we do as small benefits for the SPOCs from our site based on whatever funds we get from MOE so the course funding whatever we get we keep aside a portion for benefiting such people also and we use it for them. The local chapters we have a total of 5600 plus colleges that we are working with today across the country and about 50 colleges which are outside India too so we are working with some colleges outside India but most of them are primarily within India you can see the split of colleges that have become local chapters across the state so Maharashtra leads the count of colleges more than 1100 local chapters we have in Maharashtra Tamil Nadu comes next with 800 then Madhya Pradesh which is 530 then comes Uttar Pradesh Karnataka Kerala and so on but if you see the percentage of how many of these local chapters are active and how many are actually doing well with us in that Tamil Nadu actually tops the ranks Tamil Nadu local chapters are much more active with us participate much more in NPTEL courses and so on and then the other states actually follow so you can also see why the local chapters are very very important for us there is about 80 to 85% of the entire enrollment that NPTEL gets in every semester the exam registration that we get every semester is from local chapter colleges so you can see that the primary audience being students and faculty members in colleges actually is taken care of by the local chapters the Sparks the mentors who work there the faculty members who are behind the scenes arranging and organizing that students and faculty from the colleges can actually enroll in NPTEL courses and benefit from it that entire ecosystem we see that has contributed to about 80% every semester enrollment and exam registration to be coming from the colleges so the local chapter environment is very very important for us in the entire NPTEL journey and we thank each and every local chapter for the support that they have given us over the years and for standing with us for the last 10 years that we have been doing certification so this is the statewide numbers that I was saying that we have currently so Tamil Nadu is anywhere between 25 to 30% over the last even as you can see 7 semesters then comes Andhra Pradesh then comes UP, Maharashtra West Bengal and so on so here are some suggestions for the Sparks of newly established local chapters on what you might want to do how you would like to do awareness within your college how do you start off work on NPTEL certification courses because you are just about becoming a local chapter and how do you know visualize on the experience of other local chapters which have been with us for a couple of years so one of the things we will say is identify the local chapters that have been very active with NPTEL in the last say 2 or 3 years and invite their Sparks to your college to come and give talks, address your students address your faculty on how they have been operating within their college it will give you a good idea of what mechanisms you can also put in place to see that how students learn well from NPTEL certification courses and this we have been discussing a lot I think but just to kind of re-trade this go in for soft skill courses and English courses as the first course for your students if you are just starting off with NPTEL try programming courses if they are skilled enough or if they do not learn programming maybe you should do programming courses from NPTEL they are not easy the past percentages are not very very high but students have to put in time and effort and then they do very well in programming courses the other courses we would recommend are skill based courses such as data science, IoT, ML etc that any stream any discipline any student can actually try and do and then the motivated students the interested learners those who are aspiring to do higher education if they are in the UG program currently you can put them on the pathway for domains so if they have like 4 or 5 semesters ahead of them you can start them off from the second semester and they can start doing courses which come under a particular domain this will be really valuable for them that they will have a domain certificate as they are also graduating from your college and students writing gate exams you can also tell them about the gate portal that we have and see whether they can use it the other suggestion we had said try for re-run courses don't go in for new courses immediately the first time that you are doing courses from your local chapters so try re-run courses appoint mentors the faculty as mentors so that they can monitor the students progress and also nudge them motivate them to complete courses and submit assignments like I said you can also have periods in the timetable in the week where students actually are given time by the college to also do NPTEL courses so they can be taken to the library they sit and watch in their class they watch together they solve together whatever be the model or modality but give some time from the college timetable itself for students to study NPTEL courses and most important the NPTEL exam dates are fixed for even 2024 already we have published it on our website so go through the exam dates we have and ensure that there are no other activities happening in the college for the students and faculty around these dates please keep these exam dates clear so that they can go and write the exams and get certified from NPTEL courses if there are university exams please also tell the authorities that NPTEL exams are there being taken for credit transfer and better to avoid these dates for any other university activities or university exams communication modes with the NPTEL office how all do we keep in touch sparks from these colleges so we have whatsapp groups for sparks of every state so currently we are running about 18 whatsapp groups for instance Tamil Nadu has 3 groups Maharashtra has 2 groups and so on that is happening so on these the sparks are added to those whatsapp groups and we put out all the information alerts whatever posters messages we have to send we also put it on the whatsapp group we alert them whenever an important mail goes out so that they actually see it so that is the first part second one we have a google group for all the spocs called nocspoc at nptel.iatm.ac.in on this all the 5600 sparks are there and we can send a mail to them as a broadcast they can also write on this which helps them to interact with the other spocs so this is the second mode the third one we have an id called localchapter at nptel.iatm.ac.in this is the email id of the localchapter the team that interacts with all the spocs so once you send an email to this id the team will help you with any issues that you might have with respect to say your college your login or some other data etc that is there so if it is an individual issue pertaining only to you please write to localchapter at nptel.iatm.ac.in the lctm also has a phone number which we have published and you can call them on that you can call any of us your many of us are available to handle the localchapter queries that come in from the various spocs every thursday at 5pm their nptel office is conducting a one hour gmeet which is open to all spocs who can come and join if you have queries that are specific you can get it cleared there in the gmeet or we just walk you through the new features that have happened any new initiatives that are there we also discuss that so that you get an idea of what is happening in the nptel project and most the information is already shared on the nptel localchapter website so you can go through that also there is public information there is information inside your login and that should be quite more than sufficient for you to know about whatever is happening on the nptel front and like we have said the spocs have access to this kind of data so on swyam spocs have a login to see enrollment information assignment marks and mentor setting and on nptel website the spocs get access to enrollment data, exam registration data, all tickets and center information marks scored by the people under the localchapter and their certificates the ftp certificates detailed information about learners in the college, certificates of localchapter spocs, mentor, rating etc fee waiver selection document upload for it also the first letter that you will send to us saying we want to establish a localchapter and our acknowledgement of the same those letters also inside your spoc login and there is a public page like I showed you already that every localchapter we maintain on the website so this is all the communication modes some of them are public, some of them are individual that we keep pushing and we keep interacting with you all apart from all of this every 6 months we also conduct in person meetings in the 4 zones normally in the south zone we do it at IIT Madras, west zone we do it at IIT Bombay, north zone IIT Kanpur organizes it normally in Delhi or Kanpur and in the east zone IIT Kharagpur or IIT Gauhati will be doing the workshop so here every 6 months we invite the spocs to actually come in person so that we can interact, we can meet, we can discuss any issues from your side from our side and see how to resolve it so that the entire NPTEL certification effort which is actually a ecosystem of so many stakeholders right there is the NPTEL office behind the NPTEL office are the faculty the teaching assistants, the various institutes that are offering courses and then we have the localchapters there are students there, there are faculty members there, there is the other audience of industry professionals or people not affiliated to localchapters there are industries that are working with NPTEL, their employees are also learning, they are also giving back to NPTEL in multiple ways supporting this entire effort for us and ensuring that the enrollment to all of these courses is free that people are able to learn for free by giving us enough funding to maintain all the courses so what else do we do for localchapters here so once the semester is over and the results have come out for all the courses of that semester we have been rating the localchapters based on their participation and performance in the NPTEL courses of that particular semester so there is a formula that we use for rating and it basically depends we give different weightages for learners based on the type of certificate they got the number of learners that are there whether it is faculty or students and so on there is a formula we use for calculating the rating points for the various localchapters and the top 100 localchapters are recognized every semester with ratings as given here so the top 10 chapters are given a triple A rating and then you have 11 to 50 is given double A rating 51 to 100 is given a rating of A and apart from it we also recognize localchapters that have at least some registration with us which is 25 out of which 13 should have at least appeared and passed for courses and we call them as an active localchapter for that particular semester so these are the kind of certificates and plaques that are awarded to the localchapter which actually gets the rating and there is a formula like I was telling you which gives different weightages for the types of certificates that are there so we announce these lists publicly and we put it out on our website and we also felicitate the sparks of these localchapters which do very well during the zonal meetings that we actually have there are awards in more categories that we have been bringing about in the last couple of years based on the different types of patterns we have seen with localchapter participation so now we have awards for new localchapters that have just come in in the last semester and have already come into the top 100 so we recognize them localchapters that have a good faculty participation so the number of faculty writing exams if it is high we recognize that localchapters showing maximum improvement so last time they would have had some points calculated this time if the improvement is high then those localchapters also we recognize here improvement in terms of number of certifications number of people who are appearing from the college writing exams and passing that is something again that we recognize for localchapters we have a couple of categories of colleges that we partner with so there is of course the engineering and technology colleges there is also art science colleges which are in huge numbers with us there are management colleges, pharmacy colleges, law colleges medical colleges but the next biggest bucket after the engineering colleges are the art science colleges so we thought it would be right to recognize them because NPTEL courses don't offer all that they have in their curriculum hence their disadvantage but still they do very well in NPTEL courses and hence we thought we should recognize them so we also recognize the top art science colleges in the top 100 and outside the top 100 and then like we discussed about the stars we also recognize localchapters that have the maximum number of NPTEL stars in every semester so that is also a recognition award that goes out to the local chapter because they motivate their faculty and students to actually become a star and hence we would like to recognize that effort this is the other category that we got where we saw consistent performance from localchapters over a couple of semesters so we basically said that in the last 7 ratings if somebody has been in the top 100 they will be recognized as an LC star and they will also be given a certificate of recognition so this is something that we brought about and every semester we also look into this who has been in the top 100 for the last 7 semesters and we call them an LC star so mentors who also mentor students do have certification criteria based on mentees performance the mentees have done well and there is some minimum points that the mentors goes we also get certificates of appreciation from our site for having mentored the students very well and if the students have a topper or a gold medalist award the mentees get it then the mentor also gets a top performing mentor seal on their certificate we hope you got an overview of the various initiatives that NPTEL does starting with what is NPTEL NPTEL certification courses how do you enroll and do certification from NPTEL what is the certification criteria then a little bit about the different types of learners that we have seen the star categories that we have the domains where we have club courses that you can do together that is a second presentation that we had here which was focusing on the learner demographics and learner profiling as part of NPTEL then we looked at the various initiatives that NPTEL has surrounding the NPTEL certification courses so this included internships for toppers faculty development certificates then we have soft skill training for local chapters we have the fee waiver support from the CSR of companies and so on so we looked at all those initiatives that are kind of aligned with the NPTEL certification courses and NPTEL ecosystem so that was the third part of the presentation that we saw and the last part is the local chapters or how we partner with colleges and work with colleges to give them direct access to data of learners of the learners activity in the NPTEL courses from our site and also recognize the local chapters that are doing very well in the NPTEL certification courses so we hope you have a better overview now of what we do here the website has a lot more information about all of this please go through the website NPTEL.ac.in there is a lot of information on it presentations are given documents are given I hope you enjoy studying from NPTEL either from the repository which is all free that you can just access anytime or going through our certification on swyem portal and getting certificates from NPTEL or going through the NPTEL plus portal doing our short term workshops doing our self-paced programs that we are offering there so like they say learning never stops in life or learning is the only constant in life just as it is said it is very true so we hope that NPTEL will be able to offer you enough and more opportunities and enough and more interesting courses that you can keep learning at different phases of your life and that you continue your journey with us for as long as you can and hope you can see the benefit in it and for the students out there we would say that there is a wonderful opportunity at really no cost for you all to up skill yourself to make yourself's job ready to make yourself ready to access higher education in wherever you want to go and kind of fulfill your dreams so NPTEL is the biggest outreach from the IITs and IAC to make the education that we have here absolutely accessible to anybody who is motivated and interested to learn it is very very affordable most times it is free except for maybe the certification fee that we have for anyone anywhere around the world so please make use of this opportunity and hope to see you sometime as an NPTEL learner and interact with you all do share your feedback anything that you have about NPTEL to our support email id support at nptel.itm.ac.in and we would love to hear back from you thank you welcome to this workshop on NPTEL the national program on technology enhanced learning through this