Fifteen lakh untrained school teachers have enrolled for a training course with the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS), an autonomous institution under the Ministry of Human Resource Development, to get themselves trained by 2019 to be able to retain their jobs.

This has happened just after Parliament passed an amendment to the Right to Education Act to offer them a last window to acquire proper training, something seen as essential to the provision of quality education in government and private schools.

The highest number of applications has been received from Bihar — over 2.8 lakh — followed by Uttar Pradesh (1.95 lakh), Madhya Pradesh (1.91 lakh), West Bengal (1.69 lakh) and Assam (1.51 lakh).

The NIOS has designed online courses to enable them to acquire a Diploma in Elementary Education (D.El.Ed).

Students’ right

“Quality education is the right of students... NIOS has developed the course for upgrading the professional competence and information and communication based capacity building for teachers,” HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar said at the launch of the course.

“The course will be offered through ‘Swayam’, a platform for online education, imparting knowledge through Dish TV. This is for the first time in the world that such high number of applications have been received for an online course.”

Of the 14.97 lakh applicants, 12.29-lakh have already made the payment. The payment window is open till October 5.

“Among the over 12-lakh untrained teachers who have enrolled for the course, 9.25-lakh are from private schools and 3.53-lakh are employed in government schools,” NIOS Chairman CB Sharma was quoted by PTI as saying.

Mobile application

While only those can acquire this diploma who scored at least 50% in Class-12, Prof. Sharma said at the launch that those who could not could appear again with the NIOS to try and get the requisite marks.

A mobile application has also been developed to help teachers seek any clarifications and solutions.

Beginning on Tuesday, the course will spread over four semesters and have 1,080 lectures accessible in 10 languages.

With PTI inputs