The Ministry of HRD through its Online/Digital Education Initiatives is trying to ensure that students can continue their learning sitting at their home, during this lockdown period. Union HRD Minister Shri Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’ has appealed to the students to take advantage of these learning platforms and put their valuable time to good and optimum use. The response to this has been overwhelming.
The access to the National Online Education Platform SWAYAM and other Digital Initiatives has tripled in the last one week. Shri Ramesh Pokhriyal has said that the growth has been seen after provision of free access to best teaching learning resources at SWAYAM while earlier the courses of SWAYAM were time bound for which registration needed to be done in advance. Now to utilise this lock down period productively and to promote online learning, it can be viewed by any learner free of cost without any registration, the Minister added.
About 50,000 people have accessed SWAYAM since 23rd March 2020. This is over and above the 25 lakh students/learners who are already enrolled in the 571 courses of the January 2020 semester of SWAYAM. SWAYAM has a repository of 1900 courses which are now being accessed by people from over 60 countries.
The significant majority is from India and the other countries include USA, UAE, Germany, Nepal, Singapore, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia.
The videos of the SWAYAM Prabha DTH TV channels are viewed by around 50,000 people every day. The National Digital Library is now being accessed by about 43,000 people daily which is more than double of the usual number of persons accessing it.
The Education portals of NCERT like Diksha, e-pathasala, NROER and NIOS and the other ICT initiatives like Robotics education (e-Yantra), Open Source Software for Education (FOSSEE), Virtual experiments (Virtual Labs) and Learning programming (Spoken tutorial) are also experiencing very large access rates.
Union HRD Minister has urged more and more students to make effective use of these initiatives and enrich their learning experience.
