Chennai: Are you worried about securing a seat in the elite Indian Institutes of Technology? Take it easy! All seven IITs of the country are planning to offer lectures and course material at the very click of a mouse.

The move comes in as a part of the Rs.110 crore Government project to help lift the poor standards of academic content in an estimated 1,500 engineering colleges across India. The project is under development since 2003.

The seven IITs along with the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore had earlier planned to provide engineering students the same education as they would have received in the campus.

"The project is aimed at providing a standard for academic content for both faculty and students across India," says Mangala Sunder Krishnan, principal coordinator of the project at IIT Madras.

"A large number of private institutions have entered the field of engineering education with inadequate faculty support and training, he added."

Through this project students and faculty of various engineering colleges throughout the country will be able to access lecture videos and course material by logging on to a search engine.

Much of the course material is similar to the core science and engineering curricula that is taught at the IITs.

The union Human Resource Development Ministry has already invested Rs.20.5 crore in the completed phase I of the project.

With this, institutions have developed 240 courses in five streams of engineering - civil, computer science, electronics and communication, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering.

"We are in advanced stages of discussions with a few service providers to provide our course content on a non-exclusive basis," says Kannan Moudgalya, head of IIT Bombay's distance engineering education programme.

The concept of making IIT education online was drawn from National Programme for Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL), a project that was initially conceptualized by the faculty at IIT Madras.