WORKSHOP - NPTEL

A one day workshop on NPTEL Online Certification Courses was organized at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras on 25th February, 2014. Prof. Amit Sharma, Head of Department, Department of Information Technology and Mr. Divyanshu Sinha, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering represented Dronacharya Group of Institutions, Greater Noida in this auspicious event. Around 300 participants which included academicians, researchers and industry experts participated in this coveted event.

The event was inaugurated by Dr. Andrew Thangaraj, NPTEL Coordinator, IIT Madras who started off by explaining the mission and objective of this Online Certification Course to the audience. The Chief Guest on this auspicious occasion was Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthi, Director, IIT Madras. He elaborated further about IIT Madras’s continuing role with NPTEL to promote the establishment and use of these online certification courses at a national level. He focused on the need of clarity of fundamentals of the engineering students to enhance employability and to make them capable enough to compete at a worldwide level.

The next session of the day was jointly hosted by the industry partner’s of this venture namely NASSCOM,TCS& Cognizant. Dr. Sandhya Chintala, Vice President NASSCOM, CEO, IT-ITES, Sector Skills Council, NASSCOM urged the need of engineering graduates to be in tune with the latest developments in the industry and tune themselves accordingly in sync with the requirements of the industry to be readily employable. She described the Online Cerfification Course in Programming, Data Structures & Algorithms as babysteps towards more such offerings by NPTEL. She explained more about the collaboration of NPTEL & NASSCOM along with giants of the IT industry TCS & Cognizant to formulate the course content for this certification programme. She also reiterated the fact that Enterpreneurship is the need of the hour and the fact that NASSCOM has started a programme called 10,000 startups under which it is funding startup project proposals submitted by engineering graduates from all over India.

Mr. Krishnamurthy Ramachandran, Associate Director, Corporate Communications, Cognizant and Mr. A Pooventhan, Consultant ION Education Business TCS emphasized on the ever increasing need of skilled workforce requirement in the industry and how Cognizant and TCS identify and train potential candidates in their respective organizations.

This was followed by a series of questions from the audience which were promptly answered by the experts.

The final session of the day comprised of presentation by colleges involved in Beta Testing of Online Courses by NPTEL. Dr. P Srikanth, Assistant Professor, Dept. of CSE and Dr. Swathi Dhulipalla, Training Placement Officer, Mandava Institute of Engineering & Technology explained during their presentation how they successfully implemented this NPTEL Online Certification programme in their college and how this aroused the students curiosity to learn and explore at the same time.

Similar faculty experiences and student experiences were shared by Dr. CA Sathiya Moorthy and Dr. V. Venkataramana, Arunai College of Engineering, Dr. Kumar, Adhiyamaan College of Engineering and Dr. Sudha and Dr. Jayanthi, Jawahar College of Engineering.

The event came to a close with the distribution of certificates to the participants.