We have 40,000 colleges, over 1,000 universities, more than 35 crore students and over 10 lakh teachers in India. I urge all students and teachers to come together and help us keep the entire country safe by spreading awareness about COVID-19.
All over the globe, people are trying their best to protect themselves from the new enemy. Amid such a global as well as national health crisis, it is easy to succumb to fear and panic.
We have been receiving multiple requests from students, teachers and parents to postpone exams and shut down schools and colleges.
Precautionary measures for examination and evaluation centres were circulated in all educational institutions.
However, the anxiety among examinees and their concerned have only increased. Assessing the current stressful situation, the Ministry of Human Resource Development has taken a few initiatives for the safety of the students and teachers, to ensure a panic-free state.
These decisions have been based on scientific evidence and are motivated from the intent to avoid local risk of infection. Our objective is to delay the growth of the virus and flatten the peak of the pandemic.
The MHRD has ordered educational institutions, including the Central Board of Secondary Education, the National Institute of Open Schooling and all universities to postpone their examinations and reschedule them after March 31, 2020.
All evaluation work has also been rescheduled to after March 31, 2020.
Many Kendriya Vidyalayas have also either postponed or completely cancelled their annual schoollevel exams.
Besides the above, we have also decided to postpone the JEE Mains since the examination requires examinees to travel to different towns.
As we have to make sure that JEE Mains does not clash with rescheduled dates of the CBSE and other board examinations, we will reassess the situation and the revised date for JEE Mains will be announced on March 31, 2020.
The UGC, AICTE, NTA and NCTE will also postpone their exams to April. Now, the question arises: will students’ study get impacted during the closure of schools/colleges? The answer is no.
There are multiple initiatives run by the Ministry that ensure continuity of learning and access to essential services for all students.
The focused approach of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on ‘Digital India’ has also supplemented digitalisation of education, which makes it accessible anytime and anywhere.
Our digital schemes like SWAYAM Prabha will not let the studies of students get hampered while staying at home. The following are some initiatives and how they can help students from home.
SWAYAM (Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds): As the name indicates, it is a portal that fosters self-study. It offers massive open online courses via tutorials, lectures and discussion forums.
Apart from graduation and postgraduation courses, it also includes 28 course modules developed by the NCERT in 12 subject areas for classes IX-XII.
DIKSHA (Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing): It can help students, teachers and parents get learning material in a very engaging format.
Besides the website, it is also available as an app and has received over 55 lakh app downloads so far, having delivered 11.8 crore content sessions and 26 crore minutes of usage.
In fact, the CBSE delivers weekly Creativity and Critical Thinking Practice Tests for classes VII to X in science, mathematics, Hindi and English through the portal.
As of today, 14 feature content, 1,937 textbooks, 66,113 learning materials, 9,865 practice and test materials and 2,267 teaching materials have been uploaded on DIKSHA. You can visit the portal at diksha.gov.in.
SWAYAM Prabha: For those parents whose children are glued to the television screens, SWAYAM Prabha is an ideal solution.
It is a group of DTH channels that provides quality content for higher education from esteemed colleges.
In addition to this, timeslots of four hours daily have now been approved for selected states to offer school education content.
For instance, Channel 31 ‘Kishore Manch’ telecasts e-contents approved by the NCERT on a 24x7 basis for classes XI-XII in all subjects.
Channel 8 broadcasts high quality, visually and graphically enriched content in physical and earth sciences to undergraduate and postgraduate students.
E-pathshala: This offers educational material for students and teachers through a portal as well as an app, now also available on the UMANG app of the government.
The material comes in various formats like audio, video, e-book, flipbook and now even in augmented reality format.
The portal has 1886 audios, 2,000 videos, 696 e-books (e-pubs), 504 flip books and 70 augmented reality e-content on class IX and X science textbooks.
NROER (National Repository of Open Educational Resources): It is a collaborative platform that provides access to a large number of educational resources from primary to tertiary level in multiple languages. The platform also offers gamification.
It has a total of 14,527 files including 401 collections, 2,779 documents, 1,345 interactive, 1,664 audios, 2,586 images and 6,153 videos on different topics in different languages.