COVID19 Lockdown: UGC promotes online courses for students, teachers

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Team Careers360 | March 26, 2020 | 11:44 AM IST

New Delhi:India’s higher education regulator has recommended that students and teachers utilize the lockdown period effectively by taking up online courses.

In a communique to all vice chancellors and college principals on March 25, the University Grants Commission (UGC) secretary Rajnish Jain said that students and teachers could opt for online courses on the digital platforms.

A number of such platforms are run by the UGC, Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD),Inter University Centres (IUCs) - Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET) and Consortium for Educational Communication (CEC).

Jain said they can be used by “teachers, students and researchers in universities and colleges for broadening their horizon of learning”.

Some of these Information and Communications Technology (ICT) initiatives are:

SWAYAM online courses (https://storage.googleapis.com/uniquecourses/online.html)

It has teaching/ learning resources that any student/learner can use free of cost without registration. This was earlier delivered on the SWAYAM Platform. Those learners who registered on the platform for the January 2020 semester can continue their learning as usual.

UG/PG MOOCs (http://ugcmoocs.inflibnet.ac.in/ugcmoocs/moocs_courses.php)

This provides access to the learning material of the SWAYAM UG and PG (Non-Technology) archived courses.

e-PG Pathshala (epgp.inflibnet.ac.in)
This digital platform hosts high quality, curriculum-based, interactive e-content having 23,000 modules (in form of e-text and video) in 70 postgraduate disciplines of social sciences, arts, fine arts and humanities, natural and mathematical sciences.

e-Content courseware in UG subjects (http://cec.nic.in/)
This platform provides access to e-content in 87 Undergraduate courses with about 24,110 e-content modules.
SWAYAMPRABHA: (https://www.swayamprabha.gov.in/)
This group of 32 DTH channels provides high quality educational curriculum-based course content. The content covers a diverse set of disciplines such as social sciences, science, commerce, arts, performing arts and humanities subjects, engineering, technology, law, medicine, agriculture etc.

CEC-UGC YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/cecedusat)

This video is used to provide online lectures on unlimited educational curriculum and can be accessed free of cost.

National Digital Library (athttps://ndl.iitkgp.ac.in/)

This is a digital repository of academic content in different formats in all disciplines. The content is available at all academic levels in all leading Indian languages for all types of learners including researchers and citizens, and the differently-abled. It also provides interface support so that it can be easily accessed on all popular forms of access devices.

Shodhganga (https://shodhganaa.inflibnet.ac.in)

This is a digital repository platform of 260,000 Indian electronic theses and dissertations where research students can deposit their PhD theses and anyone interested, especially the scholarly community, can access it openly. I

e-Shodh Sindhu (https://ess.inflibnet.ac.in/)

It provides access to current as well as archives of more than 15,000 core and peer-reviewed journals. It also contains a number of bibliographic, citation and factual databases in different disciplines. The material includes content from a large number of publishers and aggregators. It can be accessed by its member institutions including centrally-funded technical institutions, universities and colleges..

Vidwan (https://vidwan.inflibnet.ac.in/)

This platform is a database of experts and it provides information about experts to peers, prospective collaborators, funding agencies, policy makers and research scholars in the country.

For any clarifications, UGC, INFLIBNET and CEC can be contacted at eresource.ugc@gmail.com, eresource.inflibnet@gmail.com and eresource.cec@gmail.com respectively.