SWAYAM is an Indian government portal for a free open online course (MOOC) platform providing educational courses for university and college learners.[1]
SWAYAM has accumulated 203 partnering institutes, 2,748 completed courses, 12,541,992 student enrollments, 915,538 exam registrations, and 654,664 successful certificates.[7]
SWAYAM (meaning 'Self' in Sanskrit)[8] is an acronym that stands for "Study Webs of Active-Learning for Young Aspiring Minds"[9]
Functionality
SWAYAM operates MOOCs learning resources in different ways and structures. Learning is delivered in four ways; e-Tutorial, e-Content, discussion forums and, self-assessment.[10]
The first quadrant is e- Tutorial, which means that there is not much extra work by students. It could include teaching video, animation, PowerPoint presentations, Podcast, and so on. These will depend on the individual subject and the strategy adopted by the teacher.[10][11]
The second quadrant is an e-content which could include e-books, illustrations, Case studies, Open source content, reference links, further reading sources, etc.[12]
The third quadrant is about clearing students' queries where students can interact with each other and faculty; any student or faculty can answer a student’s question.[10]
The fourth quadrant is self-assessment to check what a student has studied and whether they are eligible to get a certificate. This includes tests in the form of Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs), quiz or short answer questions, long answer questions, etc. The fourth quadrant also has Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and their answers to clarify common misconceptions among students.[10]
The University Grants Commission (UGC) considers that universities should play a key role in publicizing and popularizing SWAYAM courses among their learners and the university, enabling them to gain from MOOCs on a more extensive footing.
National coordinators
Nine national coordinators are appointed to manage the course content. Each coordinator is assigned a particular area for maintenance.[4]
All the courses offered by SWAYAM are recognized by the government of India. All the courses are valid in the country. UGC announced a “Credit Framework for Online Learning Courses through SWAYAM” Regulations where credit transfer was defined. The UGC regulation requires Universities to make changes in their rules to incorporate provisions for credit mobility and MOOC courses under the SWAYAM platform. Certificates will be given upon completing the criteria of the course taken, and that certificate can be used for credit mobility for academic credits.[22] The current guideline of UGC constrains just 20% of the courses for a degree-level program.
Local chapter
NPTEL is a joint initiative of the IITs and IISC. NPTEL offers online courses and certifications in various fields[23] and has set up a system to provide certificate courses in different colleges across India termed as NPTEL- local chapters.[24] A local chapter will be under one faculty member of the college as one Single Point of Contact (SPOC).
Further under the SWAYAM-NPTEL webpage, two more departments are operated, i.e., timeline, list of active local chapters, local chapter ratings, etc. Other departments show news from local chapters, i.e., local chapter colleges/universities. Each Local Chapter has a separate Coordinator/SPOC.
SWAYAM PRABHA
SWAYAM PRABHA is an education learning platform initiated by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) available through 34 (initially 32) DTH channels.[25] This initiative provides an educational program on television. As with the SWAYAM online portal, the content providers are NPTEL, IITs, UGC, NCERT etc.[26]
^Krishna, V.V.; Chandra, Nimesh (2011). "Knowledge Production and Knowledge Transfer: A Study of Two Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT Madras and IIT Bombay)". Academic Entrepreneurship in Asia. doi:10.4337/9780857938008.00014. ISBN9780857938008.
Kumar, K., Mahendraprabu, M. Open educational practices of SWAYAM programme among research scholars. Educ Inf Technol (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-021-10495-2