New Delhi: Amid the nationwide lockdown, the HRD Ministry has witnessed nearly five times more usage of e-learning platforms in the last two weeks.
A statement issued by MHRD stated, “As the HRD Ministry carries on with its efforts to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 lockdown and provide students with continued access to learning during this period, e-learning in the country has witnessed an appreciable upsurge during the past two weeks.”
Government’s online education portal SWAYAM has been accessed nearly 2.5 lakh times, and this is five times more than its usage in the last week of March.
Besides this, nearly 26 lakh learners have enrolled in the 574 courses available on SWAYAM.
59,000 people are watching the online videos on SWAYAM Prabha DTH TV channels every day.
On Thursday, the National Digital Library was accessed about 1,60,804 times.
As per reports, education portals of NCERT like DIKSHA, e-pathasala, National Repository of Open Educational Resources, and the other ICT initiatives like Robotics education (e-Yantra), Open Source Software for Education (FOSSEE), Virtual experiments (Virtual Labs) are also experiencing a surge in access rates.
“About 50-65 per cent of students in higher education institutions like central universities, IITs, IIITs, NITs, IISERs are participating in some form of e-learning,” stated the circular.
Meanwhile, schools and higher education institutions are conducting online classes using various platforms like Skype, Zoom, Google Classroom, Google Hangout.