13.26 CONNECTIVITY AND BANDWIDTH ISSUES: An integrated model for connectivity based on satellite, terrestrial (OFC / Copper), wireless would need to be developed for connecting every educational institution to begin with and then to every Indian subsequently. The bandwidth provisioning would have to be considered as an educational infrastructure and bandwidth for educational purposes would have to be made free from the user point of view.
In nutshell, the above said portal is an initiative proposed for developing an online learning platform for learners, teachers and developers to actively participate in interactive multi media course content development. The effort is targeted at making rich and accessible educational content available to learners from all walks of life and across all disciplines on a single portal. The platform is also aimed at enabling sharing of academic resources being developed by teachers and developers across the country so that a dynamic and valuable repository of material is created across disciplines by academics or other resource persons working anywhere in the ODL system. A total allocation of 5000 crore is proposed to be kept for this initiative as a whole in the 11th Plan.
