Vikash Sharma

Bhubaneswar: The University Grants Commission (UGC) has invited expression of interest from several higher education institutes and academicians to develop Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for the government’s e-learning platform, SWAYAM.

SWAYAM (Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds) is India’s own MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course) platform, which offers free online courses on almost all the discipline to students/learners. The objective is to ensure access to the best teaching learning resources to all, including the most disadvantaged.

About 2000 courses in all discipline are available on SWAYAM and 1.6 crore students/learners have been enrolled, since its launch in 2017. In January, 2020 semester, a total of 574 courses in various disciplines were offered and around 26.03 lakh students/learners got enrolled. These courses thus provide a lot of visibility and recognition to the faculty and the institute offering the course, across the country and also abroad.

In September last year, the Commission invited "Expression of Interest' for development of high quality MOOCs in 171courses in six subjects of Humanities and Social Science viz. History, Political Science, Commerce, Sociology, Public Administration and Anthropology at UG level from Higher Education Institutions and academicians.

In addition to the above, UGC has now invited from eligible faculty in l9l courses from Humanities and Social Science streams, Geography, Psychology, Economics, English, Hindi and Sanskrit and 155 courses from the Science stream -Chemistry, Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, and Environmental Science at UG level.

UGC Secretary Rajnish Jain in a notice has advised to submit proposals at httn://swavam.inflibnet.ac.in

“The development of MOOCs for SWAYAM will help the faculty in capacity building by using ICT for teaching learning purpose and also help them in improving their academic score for career progression, as per the UGC Regulations on Minimum Qualifications for Appointment of Teachers and Other Academic Staff in Universities and Colleges and Measures for the Maintenance of Standards in Higher Education, 2018,”the notice added.

 

scrollToTop