To counteract the coronavirus outbreak, the University Grant Commission (UGC) recommended students and professors to take preventive measures, preserve social distance, and use this time productively by engaging in online learning in its speech. Many online education websites now provide their information for free, allowing students to learn at their leisure from the comfort of their own homes.

The MHRD, UGC, and its Inter-University Centres (IUCs) – Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET) and Consortium for Educational Communication (CEC) – have various ICT initiatives in the form of digital platforms. Teachers, students, and researchers in Universities and Colleges can use these digital platforms for learning.

These ICT initiatives, which include a wide range of disciplines and courses, were developed by specialists to ensure that everyone has a positive learning experience.

During the Coronavirus lockdown, here is a list of ten free online learning websites and resources offered by the HRD Ministry:

SWAYAM Online Courses:

SWAYAM Online Courses gives you access to a variety of teaching and learning resources. These resources were previously distributed through the SWAYAM platform. Students or learners who registered for the January 2020 semester on SWAYAM (swayam.gov.in) can continue their studies as usual.

UG/PG MOOCs:

UG/PG MOOCs contains learning materials from SWAYAM\’s archived UG and PG ( Non-Technology ) courses.

e-PG Pathshala:

e-PG (Electronic Publication Group) Pathshala hosts 23,000 modules (e-text and video) in 70 Post Graduate fields including social sciences, arts, visual arts and humanities, natural and mathematical sciences.

e-Content courseware in UG subjects:

e-Content courseware in 87 Undergraduate courses with about 24,110 e-content modules is available on the CEC website at http://cec.nic.in/.

SWAYAMPRABHA: 

Swayamprabha is a group of 32 DTH channels providing high-quality educational curriculum-based course contents covering diverse disciplines such as arts, science, commerce, performing arts, social sciences and humanities subjects, engineering, technology, law, medicine, agriculture, etc to all teachers, students and citizens across the country interested in lifelong learning.

These channels are free to air and can also be accessed through your cable operator. The telecasted videos/lectures are also as archived videos on the Swayamprabha portal.

CEC-UGC YouTube channel: 

CEC-UGC YouTube channel provides access to unlimited educational curriculum based lectures absolutely free.

National Digital Library: 

National Digital Library is a digital repository of a vast amount of academic content in different formats and provides interface support for leading Indian languages for all academic levels including researchers and life-long learners, all disciplines, all popular form of access devices and differently-abled learners.

Shodhganga:

 Shodhganga is a digital repository platform of 2, 60,000 Indian Electronic Theses and Dissertations for research students to deposit their Ph.D. theses and make it available to the entire scholarly community in open access.

e-Shodh Sindhu:

e-Shodh Sindhu provides current as well as archival access to more than 15,000 core and peer-reviewed journals and a number of bibliographic, citation and factual databases in different disciplines from a large number of publishers and aggregators to its member institutions including centrally-funded technical institutions, universities and colleges that are covered under 12(B) and 2(f) Sections of the UGC Act.

Vidwan: 

Vidwan is a database of experts which provides information about experts to peers, prospective collaborators, funding agencies policymakers and research scholar in the country. Faculty members are requested to register on the Vidwan portal to help expand the database of experts.