Over 11 million CBSE students will be benefited from online learning

Central Board of Secondary Education’s latest initiative of “personalised learning solutions” which has been launched to bridge the digital gap and offer learning resources to the tune of one lakh questions, over 4,500 animations (animated content), 80 hours to live lectures and six hours of simulation lab in digitized for more than 11 million students. The major number of students who will be benefited with this initiative will be somewhere around four million from government schools affiliated to the Board as these resources will be made available free. Even for public schools students the content prepared by five international and national publishers will be offered at the low cost of Rs. 2 per month for classed I to VIII and Rs. 10 for the secondary level. This initiative will be implemented from August 2013.

For this job CBSE has empanelled five publishers-both local and international to offer online learning-aid for its students and improve the learning of the students under Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE). The idea is to standardised the quality of education across the country in its schools through these standardised resources.

As per the statement of CBSE officials, five separate URLs will deliver the content online to the students. The whole content will be online and students will get passwords to access their class specific content. Navin Maini, Research officer of CBSE, who is accountable for this project, said, “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.”

The content will be available from August 2013, the content will be available in English and in next phase it will be published in Hindi as well. Maini said, “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.”

There are many government school student, many of whom form financially weaker section, may not have internet access, the content to these students, “will be made available on offline mode via CDs or pen drives” added Maimi.