{"id":684,"date":"2026-07-27T16:35:34","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T16:35:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/?p=684"},"modified":"2026-07-27T16:35:35","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T16:35:35","slug":"the-headline-he-couldnt-put-down-how-dr-k-karthikeyan-turned-one-newspaper-story-into-forty-courses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/2026\/07\/27\/the-headline-he-couldnt-put-down-how-dr-k-karthikeyan-turned-one-newspaper-story-into-forty-courses\/","title":{"rendered":"The Headline He Couldn’t Put Down: How Dr. K Karthikeyan Turned One Newspaper Story Into Forty Courses"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Dr K Kathikeyan<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. K. Karthikeyan, then the Dean of Examinations at his college in Madurai, was reading The Hindu one August morning when a headline stopped him – a second-year engineering student had completed 15 NPTEL courses. He was in his fifties, already three decades into teaching, and something about a teenager’s 15 certificates intrigued him enough to enrol in his first course that same year, in 2019.He never really stopped being the person who’d just read that headline, someone who kept catching an idea and handing it to whoever stood nearest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Five years in, he had completed 40 courses out of nearly 50 attempted, on top of full-time teaching, research supervision, and a Vice Principal’s administrative load. The pace showed up in small, unglamorous ways: evenings carved out from 6:30 onward, Saturdays given up to examination halls three and four hours from home, weeks scheduled around when assignments were due.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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He doesn’t speak of the 40 courses as an achievement, but as something he continuously integrated into his professional work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The research methodology courses fed straight into training his PhD scholars. A course on NAAC accreditation became the foundation for preparing his college’s faculty for their review, a contribution he credits with the college earning an A+ grade. Even courses without an immediate professional application, became things he mentioned to students during orientation, incorporated into a point he consistently emphasised: these programs are worth the time, whatever your subject is. He eventually backed that argument with something more lasting than words. Through the college’s NPTEL chapter, he helped set up a CSR arrangement so students who completed their courses could get their examination fees reimbursed through IIT Madras.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It meant the encouragement no longer solely depended on him repeating the message every semester. The system did the convincing on its own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The habit runs in the family, quite literally. He sat beside his own son in an examination hall and wrote the same NPTEL paper. But it went further than that one exam. Struck by the quality of teaching he had encountered through these programs, he encouraged his son to pursue a second degree, the IIT Madras BS in Data Science and Applications, alongside his regular Computer Science degree on campus. His son now works at TCS in Chennai, carrying two degrees earned in parallel because his father believed the quality of teaching justified the additional effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ask him what any of it was for, and he reaches for the phrase teachers have used for generations: study for the sake of studying. In his case, it never stayed abstract. It became a faculty accreditation, a reimbursement scheme, a son sitting beside him in an exam hall. A newspaper headline he read on an ordinary August morning, and an idea he spent the rest of his career passing on to others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

Dr K Kathikeyan Dr. K. Karthikeyan, then the Dean of Examinations at his college in Madurai, was reading The Hindu one August morning when a headline stopped him – a second-year engineering student had completed 15 NPTEL courses. He was in his fifties, already three decades into teaching, and something about a teenager’s 15 certificates … <\/p>\n

Read more “The Headline He Couldn’t Put Down: How Dr. K Karthikeyan Turned One Newspaper Story Into Forty Courses”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":687,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-684","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\/684","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=684"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":688,"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684\/revisions\/688"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.nptel.ac.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}