Online learning course for 11million CBSE students

Over 11 million students are likely to benefit from the Central Board of Secondary Education's latest initiative "personalizedlearning solutions" to help bridge the digital gap and offer online learning resources to the tune of one lakh questions, over 4,500 animations (animated content), 80 hours of live lectures and six hours of simulation lab in digitized. The major beneficiaries will be around four million students from government schools affiliated to the Board as these resources will be made available free. Even for public school students these contents prepared by five international and national publishers will be available for as low as Rs 2 per month for classes I to VIII and Rs 10 per month for the secondary level. The initiative is to roll out from August 2013.

CBSE has empanelled five publishers - both local and international to offer online learning-aid for its students and enhance the learning of the students under continuous and comprehensive evaluation (CCE). The idea is to standardize the quality of education across the country in its schools through these standardized resources.

According to CBSE officials, five separate URLs will deliver the contents online to the students. All the resources will be online and students will be given a password which will allow them to access their class specific contents. "There will be question banks on subjects such as English, mathematics, science and social science. For each class there will be 10,000 questions. There will be also contents on co-scholastics activities including life skills and performing arts. Audio-visual and animation medium will be used. Children are interested in animated content and its helps better understanding of the subjects in comparison to textual content. Therefore for secondary classes there will be 3,000 animations and another 1,500 animations for classes I to VIII," said research office of CBSE, Navin Maini, who is responsible for this project.

Expected to be made available from August 2013, the contents will be in English and in the next phase they will be introduced in Hindi as well. "The weblinks are already in place and they will be formally launched probably from August. The services will be offered via school and the payments will be done by the school. But for government school students everything will be free of cost right from the live lectures to simulation labs and question banks," said Maini.

Since all government school students, many of whom are from economically weaker section, may not have internet access, the contents to these students "will be made available on offline mode via CDs or pen drives," added Maini.

Speaking about the delivery, Amitabh Nagpal, CMD, MacMillan India, said: "Some of the contents we are putting on the cloud and they will be accessible to all the students of CBSE affiliated schools up to class X, free of cost for government schools. There will be assessments, books, digital contents and other teaching aids. The biggest benefits of this initiative will be for the schools without adequate physical infrastructure as these resources will be online and can be accessed anywhere."