To promote digital education in the country and make e-learning feasible for the students and teachers, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, on Sunday, revealed the PM eVIDYA Programme. With this scheme, students and teachers will get multi-mode access to online/digital education. Over 100 universities will be permitted to start courses by May 30.
What Is the PM eVIDYA Programme?
It is a program for the multi-mode access to the digital or online education that will consist of:
Top 100 universities will be permitted to automatically start online courses by May 30. This was announced in the union budget also.
“To provide enhanced learning opportunities to 3.7 crore students in higher education and expand e-learning by liberalizing open, distance, and online education regulatory framework, the top 100 universities will start online courses. Online components in conventional Universities and ODL programs will also be raised from 20% to 40%,” the Union HRD minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank said in a tweet on Sunday.
DIKSHA, a unique initiative, will provide a ‘one nation, one digital platform’ for the school education in states and union territories: it will provide e-content and QR based energized textbooks for all grades. This initiative is also envisioned to benefit around 25 crore school-going children across the country.
DIKSHA has content in more than 14 languages, which includes Marathi, Odia, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Chhattisgarhi, Assamese, Bengali, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, and Malayalam.
In the next three years, a large number of high-quality e-resources for learning and teaching will be made available on DIKSHA through the recently revealed VidyaDaan Program. VidyaDaan is conceptualized as a common national program for individuals & organizations across the country to donate/contribute e-learning resources for school education to ensure continuity of quality learning.
There will be one earmarked TV channel for each class from 1st to 12th standard under the ‘one class one channel program’.
There will also be extensive use of radio, community radio, and podcasts among the students. Use of 289 community radio stations will be attempted for school education.
A podcast called Shiksha Vani, developed by CBSE IT, broadcasts audio content for various subjects for grades 9 to 12 in a timely, educative, seamless, and lucid manner.
CBSE-Shiksha Vani is available on the Play Store for Android smartphone users. So far, Shikshavani contains approx. 400 education content in the form of audio files on topics following the curriculum of NCERT.
Special e-content will be provided for visually and hearing-impaired children. It is developed on Digitally Accessible Information System (DAISY) and in sign language on NIOS website/ YouTube, the HRD minister informed in a tweet.
“This is going to be one of the biggest steps forward, and I feel very touched by this attempt of HRD ministry to provide equal access to good quality education to the Divyang students,” the finance minister said in a press conference.
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