Digital education and literacy: Key initiatives of MHRD

Minister of State for Human Resource Development Dr Satya Pal Singh on Thursday said that a number of initiatives have been taken by the MHRD to promote digital education literacy in the country.

While replying to a question in Rajya Sabha, the minister said that the key initiatives taken by the government include SWAYAM, SWAYAM Prabha, National Digital Library, e-Shodh Sindhu, FOSSEE and Virtual Lab.

SWAYAM

With the use of information and communication technology (ICT), SWAYAM is designed to provide one integrated platform and portal for online courses to cover all higher education subjects and skill sector courses. More than 28 lakhs learners so far have been enrolled in 1000+ MOOCs courses that run through SWAYAM.

Foreign universities can also offer their courses on SWAYAM platform and the examinations can be done through SWAYAM following SWAYAM guidelines.

SWAYAM Prabha

As one of the key initiatives by the government, SWAYAM Prabha is designed to provide 32 high quality educational channels through DTH (Direct to Home) across the length and breadth of the country on 24X7 basis.

National Digital Library

It is another initiative of the government to develop a framework of virtual repository of learning resources with a single-window search facility. So far, about 1.5 crore e-books and documents are available on NDL, contributed by 160 content contributors and over 30 lakh users from 9 thousand educational institutions were registered on the NDL.

e-Shodh Sindhu

This project of the government aims at providing access to quality electronic resources including full-text, bibliographic and factual databases to academic institutions at a lower rates of subscription. The MHRD has designed this project by merging three consortia initiatives such as UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium, NLIST and INDEST-AICTE Consortium.

FOSSEE

Designed by the MHRD, the Free and Open Source Software for Education (FOSSEE) project aims at promoting use of open source software in educational institutions to improve the quality of education, reducing dependency on proprietary software. This project is part of the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and MHRD.

Virtual Lab

An initiative taken by the MHRD under the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology, the Virtual Lab aims at providing remote-access to laboratories in various disciplines of Science and Engineering for students at all levels from under-graduate to research.

This project also plans to develop a complete Learning Management System where students can avail various tools for learning, including additional web-resources, video-lectures, animated demonstrations and self-evaluation.