Digital initiatives in higher education.

 

Digital initiatives in higher education.

 

Digital Initiative in Higher Education Through NMEICT

 

The aim to raise the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in the higher education including vocational education from 26.3 (2018) to 50 by 2035, and the quest to enhance the quality of education would require a large-scale expansion of the high-quality education opportunities.

1.    Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds (SWAYAM): SWAYAM is an indigenous (Made in India) IT Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) Platform for providing best quality education that can be accessed by anyone, anytime and anywhere using the IT system.  All the courses delivered through SWAYAM are available free of cost to the learners, however students wanting certifications shall be registered, shall be offered a certificate on successful completion of the course, with a little fee.

Important Points:

Ø The Concept of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) involves online delivery of interactive learning content to large number of people simultaneously. It allows sharing of best quality education with everyone, thereby bringing in equity as far as the quality of education is concerned.

Ø  It is developed by Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) and All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) with the help of Microsoft.

Ø Its ultimately capable of hosting 2000 courses and 80000 hours of learning: covering school, under-graduate, post-graduate, engineering, law and other professional courses.

Ø  More than 1,000 specially chosen faculty and teachers from across the Country have participated in preparing these courses.

Ø At present, the Credits up to 20% of the total courses can only be earned in a Semester by such students through online learning delivered on SWAYAM platform.

Courses under SWAYAM would be available in the following levels: For each level, there is a National Coordinator, who would be responsible for the quality of content:

·       Out of school Children: for classes 9th to 12th (National Coordinator: National Open School Society: NIOS

·        School children in classes 9th to 12th (National Coordinator: NCERT)

·       Undergraduate (non-engineering) courses (National Coordinator: CEC)

·       Post graduate (non-engineering) courses (National Coordinator: UGC)

·       Engineering Courses (National Coordinator: IIT Madras)

·       Management Courses (National Coordinator: IIM Bangalore)

·       Out of college students (National Coordinator: IGNOU)

·       Teaching the teachers (National Coordinator: NITTER Chennai)

There are 4 quadrants in the MOOC pedagogy:

      I.          Video tutorials covering a whole course – normally having about 20 hours of instruction in series of lectures, each lecture not exceeding 30 minutes.

   II.          E-Content: reading material that could add to the learning imparted through the video tutorials.

 III.          Self-Assessment: Quizzes/assignments that intersperse the course

IV.           Discussion forum for posting queries

 

 

 

2.    SWAYAM Prabha: the 32 Educational DTH Channels: The SWAYAM PRABHA is a group of 32 DTH channels devoted to telecasting of highquality educational programmes on 24X7 basis using the GSAT-15 satellite. Every day, there will be new content for at least (4) hours which would be repeated 5 more times in a day, allowing the students to choose the time of their convenience. The channels are uplinkeded from BISAG, Gandhinagar. The contents are provided by NPTEL, IITs, UGC, CEC, IGNOU, NCERT and NIOS. The INFLIBNET Centre maintains the web portal.

 

3.    National Digital Library (NDL): NDL is the Single Window Platform that collects and collates metadata from premier learning institutions in India and abroad, as well as other relevant sources. It is a digital repository containing textbooks, articles, videos, audio books, lectures, simulations, fiction and all other kinds of learning media. It aims to collect, preserve and disseminate entire intellectual output of our country and provide online access from school level to post graduate level, including technical education. 

 

Importance points

Ø There are more than 72 lakh digital books available through the NDL. The contents cover almost all major domains of education and all major levels of learners from school level to the highest level of education including life-long learners

Ø More than 15 lakh students have registered themselves in the NDL. The NDL is available through a mobile app too.

 

4.    National Academic Depository: NAD is a Unique, Innovative and Progressive initiative under “Digital India” theme towards achieving Digital enablement of the Education Records. NAD aspires to make the vision of Digital Academic Certificates for every Indian a reality

5.    Shodh Sindhu: More than 15,000 international electronic journals and e-books are made available to all the higher educational institutions through the e shodh Sindhu initiative. This allows access to be best education resources in the world using digital mode.

6.    Virtual Labs: Over 205 virtual labs in 9 Engineering & Science disciplines, comprising about 1515 experiments are operational and currently being accessed by more than 6 lakh students.  website- http://www.vlab.co.in/

7.    e-Yantra: eYantra is creating skills by setting up lab infrastructure for project based learning and training teachers in these 100 engineering colleges. web-site: www.eyantra.org

8.    Campus Connectivity: The Mission also aims to provide 20 Broadband connections of 512 Kbps speed to over 25,000 colleges and 2000 polytechnics and optical fiber connectivity one Gbps to 419 universities/ university level institutions in the country which includes internet facility. On the lines of ‘Digital India’ initiative of the PMO, the MHRD has now decided that the campuses of Universities, (having 1 Gbps bandwidth) shall be made WiFi enabled campus. Already all the IITs, IIMs, and NITs have established WiFi campuses.

9.    Talk to a Teacher: Talk to a Teacher developed by IIT Bombay, is an initiative of the National Mission on Education through ICT, funded by MHRD to provide free access to a few selected graduate and postgraduate courses, taught at IIT Bombay by distinguished faculty members and scholars at large. Apart from the core courses in engineering and computer science disciplines, the program also covers Humanities & Social Sciences discipline. More than 80,000 teachers have been trained, so far, under this project, involving synchronous delivery of courses from IIT Mumbai & IIT Kharagpur.

10. Ask A Question: Ask A Question is a unique platform through which students from science and engineering colleges all over India can ask questions and faculty from IIT Bombay answers them. Students can ask questions either through an online forum or during an interactive live session. Interactive live sessions are held on every Thursday from 4:00 P.M to 5:00 P.M in the field of Electrical Engineering and every Friday from 4:00 P.M to 5:00 P.M in the field of Physics.

11. e-Acharya: e-Acharya also called ‘Integrated e-Content Portal’ of NMEICT, is the official repository of NMEICT e-content and all content produced under NMEICT is being put at this Repository platform at INFILIBNET Centre Gandhinagar, so to apply basic tenets of preservation for digital content, implement standard Metadata schema of different types for the digital content and ensure their long-term availability.

12. E-Kalpa: As on December 2015, the content of e-Kalpa website named “D’source” includes 160 Courses on Design Learning in different domains, more than 400 Resources in the form of fine examples of Design and crafts, 110 Case studies of Design Projects undertaken by professionals and design students, 50 Video lectures and presentations by subjects experts and 600 examples of a visual Gallery that has documented works of the rich tradition of art and design seen across different regions of India.

13. The Free and Open Source Software for Education (FOSSEE): FOSSEE project sanctioned to IIT Bombay has been promoting use of open source software in educational institutions. It does through instructional material, such as spoken tutorials, documentation, such as textbook companions, awareness programmes, such as conferences, training workshops, and Internships. Textbook Companion (TBC) is a collection of code for solved examples of standard textbooks. About 2,000 college students and teachers have participated in this activity & close to 1,000 TBCs have been created in Scilab and Python alone. website: http://fossee.in

14. e-Vidwan: The ‘Information and Library Network’ (INFLIBNET) Centre took the initiative called “Vidwan: Expert Database and National Researcher’s Network” with the financial support from NMEICT. Main objective is that collect academic and research profiles of scientists, faculty and research scientists working in leading academic and R&D organizations in India and abroad;

15. Spoken Tutorial: Spoken Tutorial is a multi-award-winning educational content portal. Here one can learn various Free and Open-Source Software all by oneself. Our self-paced, multilingual courses ensure that anybody with a computer and a desire for learning, can learn from any place, at any time and in a language of their choice. Spoken Tutorial Forums is a friendly online discussion forum. You can join existing discussions or start new topics, and get lots of replies from the Spoken Tutorial community. Registration to Forums is completely free and takes only one minute.

Technical Education Quality Improvement Programme of Government of India (TEQIP)

 

PMMMNMTT- Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya National Mission on Teachers & Teaching Envisaged to address all issues related to teachers, teacher preparation, teaching, and their professional development comprehensively. The Mission caters current and urgent issues- supply of the qualified teachers, fetching talent into the teaching profession and raising the quality of teaching at schools and colleges level. Also building a strong professional cadre of a quality teacher with performance standards.

       RUSA: Rastriya Uchchtar Shiksha Abhiyan. It is the Centrally Sponsored Scheme planned by the      Central Government has to implement -the strategic funding, reforms, and improvements in the Higher Education sector at the state level.

 

References:

1.    https://www.techwalla.com/articles/what-is-email-protocol ]

2.    https://www.ugcnetpaper1.com

3.    https://swayam.gov.in/