Post-graduate Students Can Use e-Pathshala Which Offers 70 Subjects

NEW DELHI: The Ministry of Human Resource Development on Friday has asked post-graduate students to use e-PG Pathshala, that offers curriculum-based, interactive content online in 70 subjects across all disciplines of social sciences, during the lockdown.

The ministry's online learning platforms have been accessed five times more during the COVID-19 lockdown period. "The various e-learning platforms of the HRD Ministry have seen an unprecedented combined access of over 1.4 crore since March 23," a senior HRD Ministry official had earlier said on April 9, a news agency reported.

The National Online Education Platform SWAYAM has been accessed nearly 2.5 lakh times till Wednesday, which is about a five times increase over the figure of 50,000 strikes in the last week of March, he added.

"This is in addition to about 26 lakh learners already enrolled in 574 courses available on the SWAYAM platform. Likewise, nearly 59,000 people are viewing the videos of the SWAYAM Prabha DTH TV channels every day, and more than 6.8 lakh people have watched these since the lockdown began," the official had said.

Similarly, the National Digital Library has been accessed about 1,60,804 times in just one day on Wednesday, and about 14,51,886 times during the lockdown period, as against about 22,000 daily strikes earlier.

"The Education portals of NCERT like DIKSHA, e-pathshala, National Repository of Open Educational Resources, Senior Secondary Courses of NIOS, NPTEL, NEAT, AICTE Student-College helpline web portal, AICTE Training and Learning (ATAL), IGNOU Courses, UGC MOOCS courses, Shodhganga, ShodhShuddhi, VIDWAN, e-PG Pathshala.

"Other ICT initiatives like Robotics education (e-Yantra), Open Source Software for Education (FOSSEE), Virtual experiments (Virtual Labs) and Learning programming (Spoken tutorial) are also experiencing very large access rates," the official said.

The country is under a 21-day lockdown since March 25 due to the coronavirus outbreak and was later extended till May 3 to contain the spread of COVID-19. However, schools and colleges were closed at least a week before the restrictions were announced in the national capital.

On Friday morning, the number of coronavirus cases in India jumped to 23,077, but the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said at least 23,502 people have tested positive so far. The toll rose to 718, while the number of patients who have recovered stood at 4,748.

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