ICT and Governance| NTA UGC NET Paper 1 | Important Digital Initiatives For Higher Education

Parveena January 22, 2020

Online Education in higher education also becomes imperative due to the following factors:
  1.  Affordable: Online education is cheaper than formal education without compromising on quality, thanks to low infrastructure costs and large learner base.
  2.  High Quality: Online Education is directly delivered by the best teachers, assuring high quality of instruction.
  3.   Inclusive: Online Education addresses the rural-urban divide which is manifested by the fact that at present India has 4.5% graduates in rural areas as against 17% in urban areas. 
  4.  Employ-ability: By a flexible curriculum that is in line with the current market requirements, the online education can enhance the employ ability quotient in the youth. 
  5.  Uses internet: The penetration of IT infrastructure is expected to increase the internet users and  enhance access to online courses to the youth.
  6.   Smart Phones: Increasing penetration of smart phones, which is expected to increase from 29 Cr (2016) to 47 Cr (2021), would further facilitate the use of the online courses using the telecom spectrum. 
  7.  Higher spend: The households’ spend on higher education is going to increase in future, affording opportunity for the hitherto unreached population to the portals of higher education. 
  8.  Retraining the workforce: The pressing need of the employment sector for re-training and career upgradation as per the needs of the market is best served by online education leading to Life-long learning.
  9.   Skilling : The Skill India Mission would certainly require online courses for reaching out to the large number of unskilled or semi-skilled population to help them to upgrade their skills. The education through digital mission holds promise since it is accessible to everyone.
   Digital Initiatives For Higher Education 

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. SWAYAM Portal has been launched on 15.08.2016. The full version is functional since October 2016.
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. 
There are 4 quadrants in the MOOC pedagogy:
  1.  Video tutorials covering a whole course – normally having about 20 hours of instruction in series of lectures, each lecture not exceeding 30 minutes.
  2.   E-Content: reading material that could add to the learning imparted through the video tutorials. 
  3. Self Assessment: Quizzes/assignments that intersperse the course. 
  4.  Discussion forum for posting queries .
Features Of SWAYAM -
1. High quality learning experience using multimedia on anytime, anywhere basis. 
2. One-stop web location for interactive e-content for all courses from School to University level. 
3. State of the art system that allows easy access, monitoring and certification.
 4. Peer group interaction and discussion forum to clarify doubts 
5. Hybrid model that adds to the quality of class room teaching Creation of the IT Platform . 
Content creation Courses under SWAYAM would be available in the following levels:

                 LEVEL                                     National Coordinator  

  School children in classes 9th to 12th                NCERT 

  Undergraduate (non-engg.) courses                     CEC 

Post graduate (non-engineering) courses               UGC

Engineering Courses                                               IIT 

 Madras Management Courses                              IIM Bangalore

 Out of college students                                         IGNOU 

 Teaching the Teachers                                         NITTER Chennai

 There are (408) courses made available on the portal prepared by chosen professors from across the Country. 

SWAYAM PRABHA- has been conceived as the project for telecasting high quality educational programmes through 32 DTH channels on 24X7 basis. Every day, there will be new content of at least (4) hours which would be repeated 6 times a day, allowing the student to choose the time of his convenience. The DTH Channels cover:-
  1. Curriculum based course contents covering diverse disciplines such as arts, science, commerce, performing arts, social sciences and humanities subjects, engineering, technology, law, medicine, agriculture etc.
  2.  School education (9-12 levels) modules; for teacher training as well as teaching and learning aids to children of India to help them understand the subjects better and also help them in better preparedness for competitive examinations for admissions to professional degree programmes.
  3.   Curricula and courses that can meet the needs of life-long learners or Indian citizens in India and abroad. 
  4. IIT-PAL - to assist the students in the Classes 11 and 12 aspiring to join IITs by encouraging scientific thinking and conceptual understanding critical to answer the 'tough' questions of JEE Advanced, so that good quality students enter the portals of IITs. The four channels under this would be on Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Biology. 
National Digital Library  - 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. The project aims to develop
 (i) overall framework to collate large number of e-contents for school, college and higher education, e-content, virtual library, covering needs of learners with differing abilities
 (ii) Design & development of “OAI-PMH” Server for Metadata Harvesting, Indexed etc. 
(iii) serve as a pan-India virtual teaching-learning-evaluation-knowledge platform and for key national asset .
(iv) collect resources from other Ministries such as Ministry of Culture, Health, Rural Development & Department of Science & Technology on this portal.

National Academic Depository (NAD) is an initiative of Ministry of Human Resources Development, Govt. of India (MHRD) to facilitate digital  storage, access and verification of Academic Awards issued by Academic Institutions. NAD aspires to make the vision of Digital Academic Certificates for every Indian a reality. This touches the lives of Indian youth and empowers them with Digital, Online, Trusted, Verifiable Certificates which are accessible in a secure manner at all times.
  
E- Soudh Sindhu - is an international electronic journals and e-books are made available to all the higher educational institutions through the e Soudh Sindhu initiative. This allows access to be best education resources in the world using digital mode. The INFLIBNET, Gandhinagar, Gujarat is implementing the Scheme.

Virtual Labs Web- is enabled experiments can be designed for remote operation and viewing so as to enthuse the curiosity and innovation into students. This would help in learning basic and advanced concepts through remote experimentation. Today most equipment have computer interface for control and data storage. It is possible to design good experiments around some of these equipment, which would enhance the learning of a student. Internet-based experimentation further permits use of resources – knowledge, software, and data available on the web, apart from encouraging skillful experiments being simultaneously performed at points separated in space .

E-Yantra -is implemented to incorporate Robotics into engineering education with the objective of engaging students through exciting hands-on application of mathematics, computer science and engineering principles. Creation of robotic platforms has been very successfully demonstrated during phase-I of the project. Presently, e-Yantra has been implemented in 100 colleges. eYantra is creating skills by setting up lab infrastructure for project based learning and training teachers in these 100 engineering colleges.
connectivity
A total of 600 Universities have been connected through 1 Gbps Optical Fiber; 22026 Colleges have so far been connected with 10 Mbps bandwidth. 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. 

Talk to a Teacher- is an initiative of the National Mission on Education through ICT. These courses can be viewed absolutely free of charge at lower bandwidths on a personal computer/laptop having a headphone and Internet connection. Registration is not required as it does not have any evaluation/certification process. The courses are recorded live in the classrooms of IIT Bombay and may not reflect entire content of the course. Apart from the core courses in engineering and computer science disciplines, the program also covers Humanities & Social Sciences discipline.

E-Acharya (‘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. 

E-Kalpa - is creating Digital-Learning Environment for Design in India has successfully demonstrated the achievement of the following project objectives, on completion of its phase-I: 
1. Digital online content for learning Design with e-Learning programs on Design .
2. Digital Design Resource Database including the craft sector.
 3. Social networking for Higher Learning with collaborative Learning Space for Design.
 4. Design inputs for products of National Mission in Education through ICT.

Free and Open Source Software for Education  - 
FOSSE go through instructional material, such as spoken tutorials, documentation,  textbook companions, awareness programmes,  conferences, training workshops, and Internships. Textbook Companion (TBC) is a collection of code for solved examples of standard textbooks. 
FOSSEE has also undertaken several new open source software activities as well: raising Scilab toolboxes to that of Mat lab; development of eSim, an electronic design automation software, an alternative to ORCAD; development of Sandhi, a software for data acquisition and control, an alternative to Lab View.
 The FOSSEE team works on open source hardware projects, such as Open PLC and Arduino as well. Through all of these projects, a large number of students across the country have been trained.

  VIDWAN -is collect academic and research profiles of scientists, faculty and research scientists working in leading academic and R&D organizations in India and abroad;  quickly and conveniently provide information about experts to peers, prospective collaborators, funding agencies, policy makers and research scholars in the country;  It establish communication directly with the experts who possess the expertise needed by research scholars;  and identify peer reviewers for review of articles and research proposals and  create information exchanges and networking opportunities among scientist.

 BAADAL-Central Cloud Infrastructure set up a robust 24X7 backed Data Centre and the activities have been put up at NIC / NKN Data Centre, and the cloud is called ‘Baadal’. The IIT Delhi cloud is hosting e-content and video content of e-Acharya.