March 14 2014: The Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science have  joined hands  with  the Indian Ministry of Human Resource Development's  through  National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL),  to  launch  Open Online courses on the massive open online courses (MOOC) model.
The first course in the portal  was  on  programming, data structures and algorithms targeted at second year college students, with an option to attend a test in-person at the end of the course in May or June 2014. The course will run over ten weeks with 2-3 hours of lectures per week and online assessment of work. The course is  powered by Google’s open-source MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) platform Course Builder and it runs on App Engine and Compute Engine.
The  NPTEL courses will be free for anyone with access to the Internet. The portal was launched on February 28 by the Indian  minister for HRD M M Pallam Raju.