COVID-19 Lockdown: Visits to e-learning sites up threefold, says MHRD

NEW DELHI: The number of visitors to the government’s online education platform, SWAYAM, and other digital learning initiatives has trebled in the past week, announced the minister for human resource development, Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’.

The coronavirus pandemic has compelled state and national governments to suspend classes in the conventional face-to-face mode in their schools and universities. Many of these institutions have been attempting to teach online but the ministry has also promoted its own digital learning initiatives vigorously since the restrictions on movement and travel began. The most prominent of these is the Study Webs of Active–Learning for Young Aspiring Minds, or SWAYAM.

While the shutting of institutions of higher education began about a fortnight ago, India went into full-fledged lockdown on March 25.

'Overwhelming' response

The statement says that 50,000 new learners have “accessed SWAYAM” since March 23, 2020. This is in addition the 25 lakh learners who were already enrolled in its courses for the January 2020 semester. “SWAYAM has a repository of 1900 courses which are now being accessed by people from over 60 countries,” says the statement. Most of these visits are from India.

Similarly, the National Digital Library is getting 43,000 visitors daily which, the statement says, “is more than double” the usual number. Plus, SWAYAM Prabha DTH TV channels are getting 50,000 viewers daily.

“The response to this has been overwhelming,” says a statement issued by the minister. “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.”

Also read:

• Thanks to the coronavirus, public universities embrace online teaching
• Delhi University grants access to library resources from home

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