Steps taken by the Government to reduce the loss of students’ education in lockdown period

Government has formulated and implemented various plans to reduce the loss of students’ education in recent lockdown period. Norms have been relaxed to allow more institutes to offer open and distance learning courses to make-up for loss due to lock down period.

The University Grants Commission (UGC) has notified the revised UGC (Open and Distance Learning Programmes and Online Programmes) Regulations, 2020 for inclusion of more universities in September, 2020 by bringing down the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) score and universities ranking norms under National Institution Ranking Framework (NIRF). These details are available on University Grants Commission (UGC)’s website at  http://www.ugc.ac.in/pdfnews/221580.pdf.

The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has notified comprehensive guidelines in March, 2021 in order to relax the norms for making ODL & On-line education more accessible by technical institutions for courses such as management and allied areas, computer applications, artificial intelligence and data science in the engineering & technology domain.

Forty two new universities (On-line mode) and fifty one institutions (ODL and Online mode) respectively were allowed to offer various programmes. Further, National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) also opened 583 new study centres in various states from October, 2020 to June, 2021 to provide better facilities to the students

A comprehensive initiative called PM eVIDYA has been initiated which unifies all efforts related to digital/online/on-air education to enable multi-mode access to education. The initiative includes:

• • Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing (DIKSHA) the nation’s digital infrastructure for providing quality e-content for school education in states/UTs and QR coded Energized Textbooks for all grades (one nation, one digital platform)
  • One earmarked Swayam Prabha TV channel per class from 1 to 12 (one class, one channel)
  • Extensive use of Radio, Community radio and Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) Podcast- Shiksha Vani
  • Special e-content, for visually and hearing impaired, developed on Digitally Accessible Information System (DAISY) and in sign language on National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) website/ YouTube

Various digital initiatives are being undertaken by Ministry of Education viz. Study Webs of Active–Learning for Young Aspiring Minds (SWAYAM), SWAYAM Prabha, National Digital Library (NDL), Virtual Lab, e-Yantra, Free Open-Source Software for Education (FOSSEE), etc. to ensure quality education to the students. Quality Online courses are provided through SWAYAM which is an indigenously developed MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course) platform.

The initiatives taken by the Government for school education are available in public domain. Link of the same is https://www.education.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/DOSEL_COMPILATION_ON_COVID_ACTIVITIES.pdf

This information was given by the Union Minister of Education, Shri Dharmendra Pradhan in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha today.