Ministry of Human Resource Development

Department of Higher Education
NMEICT

Minutes of the first Meeting of Committee on SWAYAM Platform for MOOCs

A meeting of the MOOCs Committee was held at 5:00 p.m. on 12th January 2015 under the chairmanship of Secretary, Higher Education, in Conference Room, 112-C-Wing, ShastriBhawan, New Delhi. The list of members present is attached at Annexure-I. The background paper circulated for discussions in the meeting is at Annexure II.

In the initial remarks, the Chairman stated that:

CEC is developing e-content in 87 Under Graduate courses comprising of about 25,000 modules.

IITs are also involved in the development of online course material through NPTEL and other forums.

The Indian MOOCs platform-SWAYAM is required to be in place along with high bandwidth connectivity and data centre establishment, etc. All aspects of it should be carefully looked into and requisite technical specifications should be finalized. SWAYAM platform should be interoperable.

Current initiatives by various stakeholders in the development/delivery of MOOCs should continue till the Indian MOOCs platform-SWAYAM is established.

Prof. S.V. Raghavan, in his opening remarks offered his comments as under on various topics of SWAYAM:

  1. Policy:
  1. Indian MOOCs Platform shall run on MHRD’s own facility - Cloud Platform and Data Centre - with Mirror Sites. They may be co-located in some of the IITs, IIMs, Central Universities and NITTTRs, etc.
  2. Indian MOOCs Platform, in all respects shall be ‘Made in India’ including hardware, software, platform, etc. andappropriate open source technologies shall be used.
  3. Data Privacy, Security and integrity will be an integral part of the architecture and in the effective realization of Indian MOOCs Platform.
  4. Indian MOOCs Platform shall have interoperability; so that the content already developed various stakeholders shall be able to run smoothly on it.

B.Implementation and Operations:

  1. C-DAC and other Project Investigators (PIs)could be asked to develop the Indian MOOCs Platform, the specifications for which can be finalized by a specialized MHRDTechnical Committee.
  1. Examination and Certification:
  1. For conduct of proctored examinations for registered students, we may establish Centres at Centrally Funded Educational Institutions distributed in the entire country and at some of the State level Educational Institutions.
  2. Facilities are required to be created in as many Universities and Colleges for conducting online examinations for Indian MOOCs.

D. Transition from Existing Efforts:

  1. Till the Indian MOOCs Platform (SWAYAM) gets ready, theindividual Institutionsshould be allowed to continue their efforts.
  2. The existing courses developed under NMEICT shall be repurposed for use on Indian MOOCs Platform and only where such courses are not available, new content may be generated.
  3. The course delivery length (10 minutes or 60 minutes) may be left to individual Institutions to decide as per their specific requirements and effectiveness.

E.General:

  1. An SPV may not be required at present and the Indian MOOCs Platform may continue to be looked after by Academicians/National Project Committee to be constituted by the MHRD for continuity and sustenance of efforts.
  2. The upcoming DTH Program will have facilities at most of the Institutions of interest to Indian MOOCs Project. The DTH facilities may be utilised as feasible ina synergistic manner. For example, DTH Server Complex could be the right candidate for hosting the Indian MOOCs content.

Further the following are the excerptsof the thoughts that emanated from the discussions that followed:-

Currently, Indian MOOCs, development/delivery are operational in three flavors:

  • IIT, Bombay based on edX platform
  • IIT, Madras based on Course Builder &
  • IIT, Kanpur based on Open software such as SAKAI/MOOKIT

Based on the volume of courses and expected outreach of content to be accessed by masses, the establishment of suitable robust platform, costs involved thereon and impact on timelines for stabilizing the initiative are required to be assessed.

Selection of proper and appropriate hosting platform is very vital for sustained operations to offer services to users without any downtime.

MOOCs – Learning methods & pedagogical changes and MOOCs material making is an art.Features of entire MOOCs need to be brought in and we may not get tied to any oneplatform.

Local language translation issues need to be addressed.

Big data analytics is feasible and should be done – every keystrokeof students is captured to understand the learning behavior of students.

Commitment of teachers to deliver live MOOCs courses year after year is a challenge.

24 Schoolteachers sponsored by NCERT have also been trainedfor design and development of MOOCs for School Education.

The online examination for certification can contain drawings, programs, multiple choice questions, textual answers, etc.

The source code of the platform should be in the public domain.

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) would facilitate offloading of the video traffic.

Security and privacy of students’ and transactional data should be maintained.

20 Data Centres in CFTIsmay be established to meet our requirements.

Three types of infrastructure is required to be planned for hosting current, near future and future versions of content after testing.

Institutions need to offer good content and create an ecosystem behind for proper delivery, for this 4-5 IITs, IIMs, Central Universities, etc., may involve faculty along with Teaching Assistants for delivery of MOOCs.

It was decided to constitute a Sub-Committee headed by Prof. S.V. Raghavan to deliberate and finalizethe most suitable platform for the Indian MOOCs (SWAYAM) and the Sub-Committee be requested to submit its report by 30thJanuary, 2015. The following terms of reference have been suggested for the Sub-Committee:-

To define the scope of the development of Indian MOOCs platform (SWAYAM) – a standalone indigenous platform.

Spell out major technical specifications and features that the Indian MOOCs platform should have to accommodate content from different Institutions and delivery of courses on a large scale reaching out to 100 to 200 million learners also at a time.

Roadmap to achieve self sufficiency and sustainability in meeting national expectations.

To identify the best platform for Indian MOOCs.

To give options for developing Data Centres.

The meeting ended with vote of thanks to the Chair.

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