A case study of a first-of-its-kind remote course among premier institutions in India

This paper describes one of the first experiences of an e-learning based remote course taught between two premier institutes in India namely IIT Delhi and IIT Ropar. By using state of the art infrastructure, and by adopting an approach that advocates continuous monitoring of the quality of the learning experience, it was possible for the instructor to seamlessly conduct remote courses over a span of two years. The performance of students in the remote course was similar to that of students who had a conventional education. Lastly, this paper reports subjective feedback of students that indicate that the degree of learning is very heavily influenced by the nature of the network, jitter in the audio-video streams, and the timely availability of study material.