increase from last year
Ramakrishna Pasumarthi, Coordinator, NPTEL, IIT Madras revealed the increase in registration in the SWAYAM session at the NPTEL Center from July 2021 to January 2022. “The enrollment of 17.2 lakh students took place in July 2021, which increased to 21.62 lakh in January 2022. Exam registration increased from 2.53 lakh for July 2021 semester to 3.69 lakh for January 2022 semester. The number of courses on offer also increased from 524 (July 2021) to 593 (January 2022),” he says.
Pasumarthi also discloses the top courses and states with maximum registration in these courses. “The most popular courses are Introduction to the Internet of Things (Andhra Pradesh (AP) – 23,292, Tamil Nadu (TN) – 22,873 and Uttar Pradesh (UP) – 16,976); Development of soft skills and personality (UP – 13,064, TN – 16,394, and West Bengal (WB – 4,230) and The Joy of Computing Using Python (AP – 10,486, Telangana – 7,098, and WB – 6,005),” he says.
challenges and solutions
While Pasumarthi regards the digital divide and language barriers as the two biggest challenges facing the courses themselves, AICTE chairman Anil Sahasrabuddhe says otherwise. “The government is soon working to expand the digital circle from 2.5 lakh villages to all six lakh villages. Moreover, we have translated the most available study material in 11 languages including Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Assamese, Odia and Punjabi. For video lectures, subtitles are being made available in these languages, Pasumarthi says.
AK Bakshi, Director, Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of Delhi, says, “Many students take a free course to enhance their learning of a particular module. “Generally, for a semester, any course is of four credits with around 35-40 modules which can be completed in about 15 weeks. Once the candidates achieve their goal of learning a particular concept/module, they can skip it, which leads to disparity between enrollment and exam registration. ,
Bakshi says it is important to improve the quality of courses with the introduction of an accreditation body, which enables teachers to continuously upgrade courses to suit the changing professional environment. “The implementation of the credit transfer system will change this scenario in a big way,” he says.
Pasumarthy adds that with the AICTE order to include SWAYAM courses in the credit transfer system, the emphasis is on including more humanities and arts courses in the SWAYAM portal. “Till now, we had a total of 66/592 (11%) courses from humanities and social science streams, which need to be changed,” he says.
Saharabuddhe says gradually students are realizing the benefits of opting for online courses on their own. “At present, the main focus is on technical courses, which are also being opted by some colleges. Gradually, the students themselves will act as enablers to start more humanities courses in the ecosystem and we should see a change in the next few years. ,