Electronics, IT and IoT are the largest growing sectors in today’s age and cover vast areas in the engineering field. It is not possible for an individual to become an expert in all the fields. There is a demand of specialized skill and expertise in a specific area. Companies are demanding and preferred to hire a candidate who knows some features programming language rather than those who is conventionally graduated and did just less than nothing as extra-curricular.
Recently, National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL), IIT Kharagpur organized the SWAYAM-NPTEL felicitation workshop of the East Zone for the Local Chapter colleges from the states of Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal, Sikkim and North-Eastern states. The curriculum based and job oriented free open online courses in the MOOCs format offered by the IITs (Bombay, Delhi, Guwahati, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras, Roorkee) / IISc Bangalore under the SWAYAM initiative are being used by many Universities and Autonomous Institutions for credit transfer as per the approval of higher education regulators AICTE and UGC.
More than 16 lakh students enrolled for 291 SWAYAM-NPTEL courses during the Jan-Apr 2019 session out of which more than 2 Lakh students appeared for the certification examination. Almost 12% of the examinees were from West Bengal. Based on the performance of the students, the colleges have been rated and the top 16 colleges from the East Zone out of the total 100 rated colleges were felicitated in the Workshop in the gracious presence of Prof. Parthasarathi Chakrabarti, Director, IIEST, Shibpur, Prof. Gopal Pathak, Vice Chancellor, Jharkhand University of Technology, Prof. Nimai Chandra Saha, Vice Chancellor, Burdwan University, Prof. Adrijit Goswami, Dean Continuing Education & Coordinator NPTEL, Prof. Swagata Dasgupta Associate Dean Continuing Education & Coordinator NPTEL and others today in Kolkata On this occasion, Sri Pamir Roy, a second year Mechanical Engineering Student from NERIST, Arunachal Pradesh who had successfully completed 14 NPTEL online courses in the area of Computer Science and Engineering received India’s first Domain Certificate in Artificial Intelligence from NPTEL.
SWAYAM was initiated by the Government of India and is designed to achieve the three cardinal principles of Education Policy viz., access, equity and quality. The aim of this effort is to take the best teaching and learning resources to all, including the most disadvantaged. SWAYAM seeks to bridge the digital divide between students who have hitherto remained untouched from the digital revolution and have not been able to join the mainstream of the knowledge domain. The NPTEL is one of the National Coordinator of SWAYAM for offering the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). A total of 360 online courses covering disciplines of Engineering & Technology, Basic Sciences, Humanities & Social Sciences, and Management will be offered by NPTEL during July and October, 2019. NPTEL has partnered with CII and NASSCOM to offer job oriented technical courses as well. Prof. Adrijit Goswami, Dean Continuing Education & Coordinator NPTEL said “It is a great opportunity for the academic institutions, regular students and also for working professionals to get online education from the best institutes of India and sharpen their with job oriented skills and achieve proficiency for placement.”
