NEW DELHI: Over four million engineering students can look forward to quality online distance education material rolled out by IITs in association with partners such as Nasscom and Google.

The Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), launched by HRD Minister M M Pallam Raju on Friday, are distance education courses for a large number of participants sourced through the Internet, featuring video, text material and problem sets, providing an interactive platform for both students and professors.

The "unique" part of the entire initiative is that students can get the chance to learn from the best professors.

Its aim is to provide IT industry-ready and job-ready courses to the students and emphasis has been given on foundation skills in IT and engineering proficiency programme, professors associated with the programme said, adding over four million students would be benefitted from it.

One has to visit onlinecourses.nptel.ac.in and sign up for the programme that are of 10 weeks duration and the first offering has been prepared by IIT Madras.

"I hope that the expansion of the programme does not lead to deterioration of the quality of the content," Raju said.

Online courses begin on March 3.

IIT Bombay has also entered into an agreement with Edx and will be launching the first MOOCs course in July this year.

The online courses will be followed by an in-person protracted exam that will be held on the lines of GATE in various centers across the country. The scorecard from the certification exam and a course completion certificate will be issued to all the successful candidates.

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