New Delhi, July 4: The teacher at the Indian Institute of Technology turns around from the blackboard and looks at you, before plunging into a detailed exposition on the creation of the universe. All as you sit comfortably at your home PC terminal.

Students from across the world will soon have access to classes and faculty at the elite Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), without paying a single rupee.

Thank the Internet and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Top teachers from the seven IITs and the Bangalore-based IISc — 320 in all — are scrambling to make some of their most popular science and engineering courses available online in video form by the first week of October.

And nearly 5,000 hours of IIT and IISc lectures will soon be a click away.

This, the IITs claim, will be the largest repository of video courses held by a university or a consortium of institutes anywhere in the world.

The brainchild of IIT Madras director M.S. Ananth, the programme will provide lakhs of aspirants who fail to clear the rigorous IIT entrance examinations the opportunity to hear lectures by some of the country’s top professors.

Every year, around 5 lakh students join engineering colleges in India. The IITs take in only 3,500 of them.

“While preparing the virtual courses, we are making sure that the viewer is at no disadvantage because of his or her physical absence from the class,” says Satyaki Roy of IIT Kanpur, one of the key movers of the project.

For instance, the faculty who will appear in the videos will not — unlike even real classes — have their backs to the students all the time.

“All of them (the faculty) have been advised that they should keep turning back from the blackboard to look into the camera, so that the student feels he or she is a part of the class,” Roy explains.

The inspiration for the project — a part of the Centre’s National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning, which aims at spreading education using technology — comes from MIT.

Arguably the best engineering college in the world, MIT has had videos of classes available through the Net for close to a decade.

The plan — in the first stage — is to make available 40 hours of classes each, in 116 courses across six major subjects by the end of September.

The latest deadline the professors — used to the strict regimen of these institutes — give themselves is the first week of October.

By the end of the year, several more courses will be available online.

IIT Madras will be managing the portal through which the courses will be made available.

A trial webpage on the IIT Madras website with a few courses in written, PDF format — as opposed to the final, video form of classes — has already received over 5 lakh hits since September 2006, when the plan was conceived.

“The response we have received to the written course material itself is so fantastic.… Once the classes are available on video, we expect to be bombarded. We’re all very excited,” says Mangala Sunder Krishnan of IIT Madras, who is the web coordinator.