NalandaU – New Website Allows Students To Access MIT Quality Education For Free
Released
on: January 06, 2010, 7:13 am
Author:
Balaji Viswanathan
Industry: Internet & Online
The website sports hundreds of videotaped courses from top
universities presented in a clean, lucid interface in topics ranging
from quantum mechanics to economics 101.
CHENNAI, India - Jan 6, 2010 -- NalandaU (www.NalandaU.com) is an education website
with a mission to democratize education and enable people around the world to access
quality education from top universities. They aggregate videos provided by
universities worldwide and stitch them with open text materials to build
comprehensive courses. The courses will help any motivated learner to get in-depth
knowledge of a subject for free at the comfort of their home.
They currently have about 300 courses with about 6000 hours of instruction material.
Of these courses include 126 from MIT, Stanford, Yale and Berkeley and 36 from
Indian Institutes of Technology. The subjects interest not just college students but
also curious minds of any age. The site is clean and loads without any ads and
doesn’t require any login unless you want to access the advanced features. Most
modern browsers that came in the last 5 years should work fine with it though there
might be problems with older browsers like Internet Explorer 6 that came with
Windows XP.
Apart from watching the videos, the students can take notes in the page and access
them later – organized by courses. They can also connect with their friends in
Facebook who are also in the same virtual class, and share information. The course
pages also have related courses that the student can take next and improve the
knowledge further. Selected courses also have online quiz that the students can take
to get their grades, and can manage their transcripts from a central location. It
has a simple search tool with search suggestions and course results organized by
broad topics.
The site has been designed to reduce distraction and information-intimidation as
much as possible. The information available at each page is organized well,
unintimidating and more homogeneous, and when playing the videos you can go full
screen or hide everything other than the lecture by using “Dim the lights” option.
Company founder Balaji says, “In some of the courses the teaching is so good, you
might get the feel of actually attending classes in Boston while you might really be
sipping a cup of coffee, strapped with your laptop in the middle of nowhere”.
Some good course samples are available at:
http://www.nalandau.com/course/68/mobile-apps and
http://www.nalandau.com/course/60/management-(10)
Contact Details: Balaji viswanathan
balaji@nalandau.com
Phone: +91 444.355.7131
2012
