From the days of Military network to the age of social media sites, Internet lead us to an information explosion. It was a long way from research labs to mobile handhelds, innovation in all sense.
History of the Internet
This year marked the 40th anniversary of Unix, which provided TCP/IP networking protocol on relatively inexpensive computers. It paved the way for an Internet explosion whose ripples are still with us.
NPTEL is a great boon to Engineering students and GATE aspirants. Various engineering subjects are explained in a clear and lucid manner by senior professors at IITs, which are the most premier Engineering institutions in India (more than 9,500 hours of lecture).
Quoting from NPTEL :
“NPTEL is an acronym for National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning which is an initiative by seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT Bombay, Delhi, Guwahati, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras and Roorkee) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc) for creating course contents in engineering and science.
Course contents are useful for teacher training and through them the quality of students can be improved. In addition, the course materials (both web and video) are freely accessible by everyone independent of their geographic location. These courses can be used by professionals for updating their academic background. Open and distance education using NPTEL contents are long term prospects for IITs. The contents will hopefully help evolve criteria for focused learning and a common set of standards for professional education in India through participation by everyone concerned under this platform. “
All the videos are available on youtube. You can choose the subject of your choice from herehttp://www.youtube.com/iit .
Supporting HTML and PDF documents are available at http://nptel.iitm.ac.in/ . Use any free online video grabbing service or the free Orbit downloader to download the video for watching them offline. The youtube videos are in flash (.flv) format. It’s better to use the cross-platform open-source VLC Media player, which has separate versions for GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac.
