Coronavirus: IIT Ropar to provide online courses to students affected by suspension of classes

The Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar, on Wednesday announced it will provide online courses to students as classes in the college remain suspended in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak.

"This is the first ever attempt of IIT Ropar to record about 150 courses for B Tech, M Tech, MSc and PhD students. The recorded lectures can only be accessed by the students registered in a designated course," a statement issued by the institute said.

In the first phase, the institute will provide students recorded lectures.

"This will be released with synchronized audio. Keeping in mind the location and access of internet across the nation, the recorded lectures will include only content synchronized with audio and not the video, reducing the size of the file that can be easily accessible by any student sitting at any corner of the nation," it said.

Thereafter, IIT Ropar will start working on phase two under which it would let the students interact with the faculty to solve problems, it said.

IIT Ropar Director S K Das said, "For long IIT Ropar is planning to offer online courses using the model of massive open online courses and this situation demands such an initiative at a massive scale to provide theory classes to students while creating a pool of online lectures. Currently, the courses will be a partial solution to cover academic loss.