To commemorate the two-year anniversary of the National Education Policy 2020, the University Grants Commission will launch a platform on Friday where its digital educational content for UG and PG courses will be freely available to anyone.
Over 23,000 postgraduate courses and 137 massive open online courses (MOOC) from the government’s Study Webs of Active-Learning for Young Aspiring Minds (SWAYAM) portal in emerging fields, as well as 25 non-engineering courses, will be available in eight languages.
The platform will be launched with the help of the IT ministry.
Courses will be available on academic writing, artificial intelligence, biomolecules, biostatistics, corporate law, cyber security, food microbiology, corporate law, city planning, human rights, intellectual property rights, and animation, among others.
Students can access these courses at any of the 5 lakh common service centres for Rs 500 per month, even though there is no fee to access them through the portal.
UGC chairman M Jagadesh Kumar said the portal will be launched on July 29 to commemorate the second anniversary of the NEP.
‘As part of its efforts to make higher education accessible to all, UGC is constantly working to make digital resources available to the students in English and regional languages. To make the last-mile connectivity a possibility, the UGC has recently tied up with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to integrate the UGC e-resources with their Common Service Centres (CSC) and Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) Centres,’ Kumar said.
The CSC and SPV Centres, which have computers and internet connectivity, are managed and operated by local entrepreneurs who earn their living by delivering online services.
There are nearly 2.5 lakh CSCs/SPVs centres operating in Gram Panchayats and more than 5 lakh CSCs/SPVs centres functional across the country.