Here’s what SWAYAM can learn from online teaching during Covid

Sunita Jacob and other teachers share insights on online teaching, student engagement, and challenges faced in SWAYAM courses.

“It was all so sudden, but we had to act quickly”, says Sunita Jacob, a mathematics teacher from Clarence High School, Bengaluru, who retired from her formal teaching career about a year ago. The online experience for her in 2020 was one of learning very quickly how to take a class online and keep her students engaged for 40 minutes. It would set her up for retirement, she says, as she now splits her time taking some extra classes online and working on writing a new mathematics textbook for the Class 10 CBSE curriculum.

Ms Jacob and others’ pandemic-era takeaways relevant for the increasingly popular online SWAYAM courses that the government is encouraging for higher education. More interaction, effective monitoring of students beyond a command-and-control approach, and allocating weightage to the educational value of course content rather than just popularity may put SWAYAM on a firmer footing.

Sara Tony, who runs the NIOS department at Bethany High School, experienced a steep learning curve when transitioning to online teaching during the pandemic. Like many teachers, she faced challenges in adapting to new technologies and keeping students engaged. Despite these challenges, Sara successfully integrated online tools into her classroom. And within three weeks, everyone was familiar with the routine: four to five hours of class, followed by all the readings uploaded onto the platform for the next day. While the pandemic placed the country and Indian education system onto the petri dish of new tech and online learning, the government had been working on something similar for much longer.

In May, 2024, the Ministry of Education put out a notice with the revised guidelines for the SWAYAM for developing online classes. SWAYAM (Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds) was implemented in 2017 many years before Covid, and (overlooking the forced acronym) was envisioned as a method of allowing greater access to quality digital education for anyone who wanted it. In their own words, “SWAYAM seeks to bridge the digital divide for students who remain untouched by the digital revolution.” As of July 2023, 3,087 courses have been created of which 10,514 course deliveries have been made rounding off 3.84 crore total student enrolments in these courses. While the program has seen significant enrolment, it has also faced challenges in ensuring student engagement and overcoming technical barriers.

SWAYAM built a significant enrollment base during covid, and focused on external skills building while teachers in schools teaching compulsory subjects were still grappling with their task of making online learning as relatable as the classroom experience

SWAYAM is meant to serve as a skill-building programme to a wide audience of higher secondary school-going students up to university enrolled students and working professionals. It bases itself on ‘self-paced’ learning and depending on the numbers of credits can go anywhere from 5 to 12 weeks in a semester.

The core of SWAYAM courses exists in 4 quadrants – (1) a video lecture, (2) specially prepared reading material that can be downloaded/printed (3) self-assessment tests through tests and quizzes and (4) an online discussion forum for clearing doubts.