The Indira Gandhi National Open University (Ignou) has signed an agreement with the government’s Common Service Centres (CSC) under the Digital India programme for facilitating a bunch of online support services to its prospective and enrolled students.
The university said the MoU that was signed on August 22 will help students to submit online admission and examination forms, re-register, and avail of other services provided by Ignou, including payment facilitation through the CSC SPV Digital Sewa portal.
CSCs are access points in villages where the government provides a host of services related to ration cards, birth certificates, railway tickets, money transfers, etc. The CSCs also train people for using digital services.
Over 2 lakh CSCs will act as a single contact point for all the digital support services of the university.
“This initiative will help the IGNOU to outreach its potential students in far flung and disadvantaged regions besides providing alternative digital support helpdesk to urban and semi urban students. The University is also progressing towards digitizing its learning resources (study materials) and students can be benefitted to access its learning resources at CSCs,” it said in a statement.
Ignou is planning a series of workshops for the Village Level Entrepreneurs (VLEs) of the CSCs to acquaint them with the digital support services to be given to its students. The regional workshops under the first phase will be held in Lucknow, Patna, Jammu, Ahmedabad, Raipur, and Guwahati in September.
The university is also contemplating to train and orient the VLEs to brand its Digital Learning Ambassadors (DLAs).
