A. Mareeswari
There is one moment A. Mareeswari returns to whenever she thinks about NPTEL. It was the afternoon she walked through the gates of an IIT for the first time and simply stood there, looking. The coordinators were moving past her, while researchers headed somewhere with folders under their arms. She had come for the NPTEL Star ceremony, an invitation she received after becoming an NPTEL Domain Scholar by completing the programming domain. She took her time walking around. She had not planned to, but she did.
Mrs. Mareeswari is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at V. H.N. Senthikumara Nadar College, Tamil Nadu, with sixteen years of teaching experience. She has always encouraged her students to step into territory just outside their comfort zone. What is less visible is that she has been doing exactly the same thing to herself. After finishing school, she had wanted to pursue engineering, but circumstances took her elsewhere. The IITs, and everything they represented, had stayed at a careful distance – a door she could see but not open. Until she found the key.
It all started in 2016, when she was preparing for the NET examination and hit a dead end with Theory of Computation, a subject that was miles away from her everyday teaching. Someone pointed her to NPTEL, and she found the course in what appeared to be a surprisingly well-stocked digital library.
She enrolled, sat with the material night after night, and by the time the exam arrived, questions that had once felt impenetrable had begun to make sense.
At that point, NPTEL was simply a tool. She had no idea she would still be on the platform a decade later.
By 2018, one course was no longer enough. When she discovered that NPTEL offered domain certifications, it changed the scale of her ambition entirely. She set her sights on Artificial Intelligence, beginning with Artificial Intelligence: Search Methods for Problem Solving by Prof. Deepak Khemani. She built it course by course, result by result, and what started as one domain eventually grew into four: ‘Data Science and Programming’ completed, with ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘Operations Management’ in progress.
What she was absorbing didn’t stay at her desk. Her students noticed because they could see what it was doing. “As a teacher, we have to learn day by day,” she says. “Once we get real-time problems, we should share those examples with our students.” She brought NPTEL assignments into the classroom and worked through problems alongside her students. Some enrolled on their own. One followed her into the Programming domain and completed the certification. Another went further and earned an NPTEL Discipline Star. Across 44 courses and counting, the learning had started flowing in both directions.
Natural Language Processing was the course that pushed the heaviest door open. The problem-solving sessions were rigorous, and the drop-off rate was severe. Of 150 learners enrolled, only two passed—and Mareeswari was one of them.
That result led her to pursue the NPTEL Data Science domain and, shortly after, a PhD with NLP and Deep Learning at the centre of her research.
“NPTEL gave me the strength to explore my knowledge,” she says. The course she had taken to stretch her teaching had become the key to a different kind of work.
NPTEL gave Mareeswari a way to stand more firmly in front of others. She speaks of confidence, guest lectures, invitations to serve as a resource person, and the moment she first stepped into an IIT – an experience she still remembers. The memory that lingers is not only the recognition but also the readiness it brought with it: a teacher who had become, in her own words, a learner again, and had no intention of stopping there.
~written by Nehansh Kesharwani