Amid lockdown, govt's self-learning platform a big hit among students

With all educational institutes being shut due to the ongoing COVID-19 lockdown, the government's self-learning platform 'swayam' has seen an upsurge in the number of enrollments.

Hyderabad: In the wake of the COVID-19 lockdown, there is now a huge demand for self-study options through online courses led by the Central Human Resources Department.

A few years ago, the central government had launched a platform called 'swayam' in line with the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to promote nation-wide online education. There are about 1900 courses on this platform, which were created by the IITs, IIMs and Central Universities.

During the semester last January, around 25 lakh people registered themselves in around 571 courses, not only from India, but also from around 60 other countries.

Of late, due to the COVID-19 outbreak, all educational institutions have been closed down which in turn has increased the demand for these online courses.

During the current year, within a period of five days from March 23 to 27, almost 50 thousand students have enrolled themselves for online courses.

Read:Educational institutions switch to virtual classes to continue teaching amid shutdown

Further, what makes these online courses extremely popular, is the fact that they are free.

Around 50 thousand people are availing these courses on a DTH platform named 'SwayamPrabha', on TV sets from the comfort of their homes.

In another mind-boggling stat, around 43 thousand people are registering themselves everyday during this period on the National Digital Library platform, which is more than the double the number on any normal day, the Central government declared.

The Central Human Resources Department has also informed that a large number of students are using NCERT-based Deeksha, ePathshala, e-Tactics, Virtual Labs and Spoken Tutorials specially designed for Robotics Education.

Read:Golden path of quality education