{"id":633,"date":"2026-07-06T12:10:29","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T12:10:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/?p=633"},"modified":"2026-07-06T12:10:29","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T12:10:29","slug":"thirty-minutes-at-a-time-swapnil-shenvi-turned-his-daily-commute-into-a-classroom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/2026\/07\/06\/thirty-minutes-at-a-time-swapnil-shenvi-turned-his-daily-commute-into-a-classroom\/","title":{"rendered":"Thirty Minutes at a Time: Swapnil Shenvi Turned His Daily Commute into a Classroom"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\u00a0Dr. Swapnil Shenvi<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a particular kind of discipline that has nothing to do with willpower and everything to do with routine. For Swapnil Shenvii, a Company Secretary and Assistant Professor of Finance at NMIMS (Deemed to be University), Mumbai, that routine looks like this: a 30-60 minute commute, a pair of earphones, and a lecture video playing quietly in the background. It has looked like this for nearly a decade, and in that time, it has taken him through 27 NPTEL courses.

Around 2016-17, Swapnil came across NPTEL through newspaper advertisements, an initiative offering quality education from the IITs at a fraction of the usual cost. He signed up with no real plan in mind. “I was just casually exploring,” he says. There was no certificate he was chasing, no requirement to fulfil. He simply wanted to see what it was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The course that changed it all was on GST, still a fairly new subject at the time. Working through it, Swapnil began to notice something: the sheer effort NPTEL had put into its videos, its assignments, its structure of internal assessments and term-end exams. Around the same time, he discovered the \u2018ARPIT\u2019 courses: refresher programmes designed specifically for teachers and something shifted. The curiosity that once drew him in had hardened into intention. Exploration was behind him now, what remained was the work of building. Every Wednesday since has carried a particular weight – assignment deadlines fall on that day, and Swapnil has built his week around it. Lectures fill his commute, thirty to forty minutes of video at a time, until a week’s worth of content is done. It is, in his words, a matter of “Small steps every day,” and not last-minute cramming. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“You can’t do these courses in one sitting” he says. “It is perseverance on a daily basis.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

That perseverance was tested after the pandemic, when Swapnil began enrolling in four, five, sometimes six courses a semester. One course on game theory nearly stopped him, until he switched to listening in Hindi, turning a stumbling block into just another small challenge to work through!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond the classroom, the courses reshaped how Swapnil moves through the world. Colleagues began to recognise him as “The NPTEL person” at his institute, and students started approaching him with questions about registration and subject-matter. A set of courses in Psychology gave him a sharper read on people, an understanding, he says, he never picked up in his own years of formal schooling. And a course on Gamification in Teaching now shapes how he runs his own lectures.

According to him, holding a certificate from an IIT carries a particular kind of weight, a boost of confidence hard to put into words. What began as a private pursuit soon rippled outward: friends who once teased him for collecting “So many certificates” eventually followed his lead, with one registering for twelve courses in a single semester. Looking ahead, Swapnil is now pursuing his Post-Doctoral work in finance, weaving in what he has learned from NPTEL courses on AI’s growing role in the field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To those still hesitating, he offers a simple piece of advice. NPTEL, he says, was never only about the certificate. It is accessible, heavily subsidised education from India’s finest institutions – often available for a fraction of what similar courses cost elsewhere – with the added possibility of internships for those who perform well. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Why not,” he asks, “pursue a course at a much cheaper rate instead of struggling through an entire semester ‘s worth of fees?”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

~written by Elsa Prasad<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Dr. Swapnil Shenvi There is a particular kind of discipline that has nothing to do with willpower and everything to do with routine. For Swapnil Shenvii, a Company Secretary and Assistant Professor of Finance at NMIMS (Deemed to be University), Mumbai, that routine looks like this: a 30-60 minute commute, a pair of earphones, and … <\/p>\n

Read more “Thirty Minutes at a Time: Swapnil Shenvi Turned His Daily Commute into a Classroom”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":637,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nptel-star"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=633"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":638,"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633\/revisions\/638"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}