The inevitable fall out of the Covid 19 lockdown, imposed in the month of March 2020, was the nationwide shift towards online mode of delivering lectures and continuing with the teaching-learning process. The challenge that the Institution needed to address was to train the teachers for online teaching and continue to conduct the nationwide teacher training programmes, organised by the Teaching Learning Centre of the College.

With this in perspective, the Institution adopted a strategic plan of tasking the Research Development and Services Cell of the College to develop the following:

1. Design a customised Learning Management System (LMS) platform to cater to a large number of participants.
2. The LMS was required to be designed with a user-friendly interface and incorporate self-evaluation methods and a comprehensive feedback system to assess learning outcomes.
3. Customised templates of programme structure for easy accessibility.
4. The programmes on the LMS were to be self-paced, allowing the participants to access the course content at their convenience. However, the quizzes/assignments were to be completed within a given time frame.
5. Create a database of online resource persons across the country for providing enriching academic content for online lectures.
6. Facilitate capacity building of teachers nationwide.
7. Develop a system of issuing online certification, using the Blockchain Technology.
8. Optimal use of the resources of the Media Lab to develop audio-visual resources for online dissemination of academic lectures.

With the above objectives in place, Ramanujan College launched online programmes through its Teaching Learning Centre, under the aegis of the MoE sponsored PMMMNMTT scheme. In the past one year, the College has conducted 54 online programmes, including one to three-week discipline-specific Faculty Development Programme/Refresher Courses, one to three-week courses on research and ICT and four-week Faculty Orientation/Induction Programmes for newly recruited teachers. Over a lakh of teachers nationwide have been successfully trained till date.

The successful implementation of this strategic plan has had the following direct benefits for the College:

1. Boosted the technical capability of the teachers of the Department of Computer Sciences and now the College is preparing to start a Data Processing Centre.
2. Major impetus to prepare the teachers of the College as resource persons for conducting training programmes.
3. Enhanced the perception of Ramanujan College nationwide as a leading institution that provides high quality online academic programmes.
4. The satisfaction of fulfilling the institutional vision and mission of reaching out to the unreached.
5. The LMS has been cost effective in terms of reaching out to a large number of participants as compared to offline programmes.
6. Promoted peer learning and encouraged the participants to resolve queries among themselves.
7. Developed a nation wide network of participants.

In keeping with the Institutional mission of nation building, this strategic plan helped in capacity building of a huge number of teachers across the country, many of them located in remote areas.

MoU between Teaching Learning Centre, Ramanujan College and Research Development & Services Cell (RDSC)

List of online programmes conducted under this strategic plan with reports

List of the Faculty members of the Ramanujan College involved in creating online modules in the FDP/ Orientation/ Induction/ Workshops organized by the TLC