SWAYAM is India’s national MOOC platform, designed to achieve the three cardinal principles of India’s Education Policy: access, equity and quality.

Class Central has been keeping track of SWAYAM’s progress since the platform was first announced back in August 2014.  Since its beta launch in July 2017, the platform has enrolled over 10M learners. At the rate it’s growing, in a few years, SWAYAM could become the world’s largest MOOC provider, offering courses in a wide variety of disciplines and that from prestigious Indian institutions such as IITs and Central Universities.

In July 2019, SWAYAM’s homepage and course catalog were revamped, notably to include all courses offered by NPTEL, a group comprising some of India’s most prominent engineering institutions. All these courses can be taken for free. Students can also choose to pay a small fee (about $15) to sit a proctored exam in an examination center in India to earn a certificate of completion.

Certificates may, in turn, be used by students enrolled in India’s higher education to earn academic credit for completing SWAYAM courses earmarked as credit-eligible by their universities. If you’d like to know more about how India is leveraging SWAYAM at the university level, head to our previous article: In India, MOOCs Are Now Part of the Education System.

I personally completed several courses on SWAYAM, including a SWAYAM-NPTEL course that was part of the last semester of my master’s degree in computer science (specialization in AI) at the Central University of Rajasthan, India. I paid a small extra fee (less than $2) to receive the certificate (embedded below) by mail. Since then, paper certificates have been discontinued, but students can still obtain virtual certificates that afford the same privileges.

Suparn NPTEL certificate

I joined the Class Central engineering team in April 2019, and part of my job is to make sure that Class Central’s catalog is up-to-date. This means I maintain as well as write new scrapers that collect the course information from different providers.

And I am happy to say that we now list all SWAYAM courses. There are more than 600+ free online courses starting in January and February 2020. If you want to be notified about these courses, please use the follow button and Class Central will keep you in the loop.

Below is a list of all SWAYAM courses categorized by subject.

Humanities (47)

Programming (19)

Computer Science (38)

Engineering (155)

Data Science (7)

Business (78)

Science (108)

Health & Medicine (16)

Social Sciences (54)

Education & Teaching (24)

Art & Design (12)

Mathematics (34)

Personal Development (10)

This post was originally written by Suparn Patra on Class Central's MOOCReport publication.