UGC opens portal to make UG, PG courses’ digital content accessible for free

Students can access these courses at any of the 5 lakh common service centres for Rs 500 per month

To mark the two-year anniversary of the announcement of the National Education Policy 2020, the University Grants Commission, on Friday, launched a platform to make all its under-graduate and postgraduate courses’ digital educational content available for free.

Over 23,000 post-graduate courses and 137 massive open online courses (MOOC) of the government’s Study Webs of Active-Learning for Young Aspiring Minds (SWAYAM) portal in emerging fields, as well as 25 non-engineering courses on SWAYAM, will be available in eight languages. The platform will be launched with the help of the IT ministry.

Courses will be available on academic writing, artificial intelligence, biomolecules, biostatistics, corporate law, cyber security, food microbiology, corporate law, city planning, human rights, intellectual property rights, and animation, among others. While there is no charge for these courses when accessing it on the portal, students can also access the courses at 5 lakh common service centres across the nation for Rs 500 per month.

UGC chairman M Jagadesh Kumar said the portal was launched on July 29 to commemorate the second anniversary of the NEP. “As part of its efforts in making higher education accessible to all, UGC has been constantly working to make digital resources available in English, as well as regional languages. To make the last-mile connectivity a possibility, the UGC has recently tied up with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to integrate the UGC e-resources with their Common Service Centres (CSC) and Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) centres,” Kumar said.

The CSC and SPV centres, which have computers and internet connectivity, are managed and operated by local entrepreneurs, who earn their living by delivering online services. There are nearly 2.5 lakh CSCs/SPV centres operating in gram panchayats and more than 5 lakh CSCs/SPV centres functioning across the country.