Friends: Many universities around the world, following MIT's Open Course Ware project, are providing their course material free on the Internet. In China and Japan universities take the trouble to translate the material into Chinese and japanese. As far as I know, not a single university in India has taken to providing the course ware on the Net for people to use. Of course IGNOU broadcasts over radio and television a large number of programmes under its Gyan Vani programme. Leading universities and university teachers should come forward to make thie courses available to students (and others interested to learn) on the Net. That could be one small step in making India a knowledge society. Subbiah Arunachalam --------------------

From MIT's Open Course Ware site

8. China Quality OCW (CNQOCW) ---------------------------------------------------------------- China Open Resources for Education (CORE), MIT OCW's Chinese language translation partner, now offers links to more than 450 China Quality OpenCourseWare (CNQOCW) courses for use and sharing in China and globally. In addition, CORE has translated 110 MIT OCW courses into Simplified Chinese, which are available at http://www.core.org.cn/OCW_CN/Global/all-courses.htm 9. Japan OCW Alliance ---------------------------------------------------------------- The leading nine universities in Japan -- Hokkaido University, Keio University, Kyoto University, Kyushu University, Nagoya University, Osaka University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, the University of Tokyo, and Waseda University -- have formed the Japan OCW Alliance. These six universities now offer open access to more than 100 courses, in both English and Japanese. 10. FETP OCW in Vietnam ---------------------------------------------------------------- Inspired by the MIT OCW initiative, the Fulbright School Economics Teaching Program (FETP) in Vietnam launched FETP OpenCourseWare in 2003, the first "opencourseware" project to launch after MIT OCW opened in September 2002. The Fulbright School participates with other academic institutions in Vietnam to promote the use of innovative long-distance learning activities.