NPTEL+ portal Self paced courses and short term training programs | NPTEL Awareness E-Workshop |

[0:04]Uh the next uh 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. So 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 SWAYAM, it is not currently possible. But then we were getting many requests where people said we want anytime 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 uh the differences between NPTEL and NPTEL Plus. So NPTEL can run only Senate approved academic courses which are normally taken for credit transfer. Their audience is students and faculty members in colleges. The courses are of fixed durations, 4, 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 uh offer any type of training program, it can be a short-term training program of just two hours, it can be up to four hours, it can be up to eight hours, it can be two days, three days, five days, ten 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, NPTEL 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 SWAYAM courses where we have a in-person proctored exam. Here the criteria depends on the type of workshop we are running again for the certification. Any time of the year we offer all these and any number of times you 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 that we have offered. Data visualization with R, there's data science applications in drug discovery and genomics. Then there's something for faculty to say re-energizing the classroom through the use of gamification. There's machine learning techniques in biology, then introduction to bio-mimicry, 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 for 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 courses has a fee. There is a fee to enroll, it is not free like we do in SWAYAM, 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% cut off. So that is something that we do here, it is not best three out of four or best four out of six, 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 exams are conducted every week. So you can potentially enroll to a course, you can maybe complete the course in about a week's time, say you go through the videos, you do the assignments, you clear the cut off 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 anytime certification portal of NPTEL which is what is called NPTEL. 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 three 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 NILIT for say their labs, their virtual 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.