New Delhi: With e-learning — be it through 200+ government-run TV channels, mobile phones or radio networks — becoming increasingly popular among students, the central government is working on creating a standardised online curriculum across state and central boards, ThePrint has learnt.
To that end, the Department of School Education & Literacy, Ministry of Education, set up a 21-member advisory committee this January. Led by government organisations — National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) and the National Educational Technology Forum (NETF) — the committee includes subject experts.
Other participants include higher education institutions, such as Gujarat-based Ganpat University, EdCil India Limited, a public sector education consultancy, EkStep Foundation, a philanthropic organisation providing learning opportunities to students, and Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham.
The committee has held three rounds of discussions so far, ThePrint has learnt.
The NCERT, which assists and advises both central and state governments on policies and programmes for qualitative improvement in school education, will create content. The NETF, which was set up in line with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 to facilitate decision-making on the induction, deployment and use of technology in educational institutions, will create a framework based on which quality content will be filtered and selected.
NETF chairman Anil Sahasrabudhe told ThePrint, “The objective of the committee is to identify high-quality engaging content which improves the understanding of students. We want the stakeholders (to identify ‘difficult subjects and topics’) and the committee is tasked to come up with the best quality content options.”
The process involves the members presenting their suggestions and available resources for a framework to filter good content. Then, pilots will be conducted to check the effectiveness of the selected content.
The content will be in compliance with the NEP 2020 and be based on the National Curriculum Framework, a draft of which was released in April.
Dr Amrendra Behera, Joint Director at the Central Institute of Educational Technology (CIET), which functions under the NCERT and is involved in the process, said standardisation is an essential requirement in order to bring homogeneous content on platforms that function across India.
“Educational content up to Class 8 has a variation of about 70-80 per cent since state boards incorporate regionally relevant content in the chapters. In order to ensure that there is similarity in content across boards, we are devising standardised content to be taught across the tech platforms,” he added.
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Action points
The advisory committee has also come up with action plan points that each member will undertake to fulfil, members said.
Sahasrabudhe said the committee will make recommendations based on the content presented to them by all stakeholders, including higher education institutions and schools. For instance, Ganpat University has offered its portal, Guni Guru, to impart “value-based education” to students.
Saurabh Dave, the pro vice-chancellor of the university, told ThePrint, “The incubation centre at our university has come up with life skills, value-learning and self-improvement modules on our Guni Guru portal to help students lead a value-based life… We have provided the option of providing it to the committee.”
In addition to this, the technical institution is working on creating a system that will provide end-to-end monitoring of the safety of students travelling from school to home and back. They are also developing content for school education up to Class 10 in Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi and Kannada.
Another member of the committee, Bengaluru-based EkStep Foundation, has offered to provide access to its digital public infrastructure to aid the committee’s objective of providing online content.
Gaurav Gupta, Chief Growth Officer at the organisation, told ThePrint about Sunbird, an open digital platform that has been leveraged by the Ministry of Education for the DIKSHA (Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing) portal for teachers.
He said the scope of the platform could be expanded. “Sunbird is designed to support multiple languages and multiple teaching and learning solutions by providing the building blocks for the development of platforms and learning solutions to suit various use cases, languages, contexts and needs. It can be used by any organisation,” he added.
(Edited by Smriti Sinha)
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