Bhubaneswar, Sept. 19: The All India Council for Technical Education is set to go online with its study materials.

The council will shortly launch Swayam (Study Webs of Active-Learning for Young Aspiring Minds) - an open online platform developed by the ministry of human resource development - to help engineering students.

Swayam will offer around 2,000 online courses for more than three crore students. Students will also be eligible for certificates from institutes when they successfully complete the courses.

Council chairman Anil D. Sahasrabudhe announced the development at the regional convention on Polytechnic Education in Eastern States, which is jointly organised with the Directorate of Technical Education and Training hin Bhubaneswar.

Swayam will help faculty from across the country to upload content on the platform that students, especially those living in remote areas, can easily access. "This way, faculty members from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) can upload content that students in geographically disadvantaged regions can access," he said.

Sahasrabudhe also encouraged teachers to contribute content to the platform, which has been developed along the lines of the Massive Open Online Course (Moocs) platform in the United States.

The council has also tied up with Microsoft as its technical partner for Swayam.

The US tech giant will create a mobile platform for the programme.

According to the University Grants Commission Regulation, 2016, the partner institutes identified by the national Moocs co-ordinator will make the online courses available on the platform.

The students who sign up for the programme will be able to use physical facilities such as the institute's laboratories, computer facilities and library free of cost.

The credits earned through courses on Swayam as part of the programme's credit plan will have equivalent weight as regular courses.

Calling for proper training of teachers, Sahasrabudhe said there was an urgent need for teachers to reinvent themselves, update their pedagogy and introduce new teaching methods to make classes more interesting for the students.

He said the colleges had been provided with the autonomy to change the curriculum to allow them to explore new and interesting programmes according to the demands of the industry.

"We have allowed colleges to have adjunct faculty - those from the industry with rich experience to teach students - to encourage and create a link between the industry and academia," said Sahasrabudhe. He added that the institutes needed to reach out to the industry to understand the challenges they faced.

Students could take up these challenges as projects and come up with innovative solutions.