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Dr MCR HRD Institute has demonstrated how it has manged to pull through the foundation course (FC) for 142 trainee civil servants and another FC for 33 military engineer services probationers during the coronavirus pandemic.
The courses conducted by Dr MCR HRD Institute, had to be called off midway on account of the Covid-19 outbreak. All the officer trainees (OTs), were sent back to their native places/work units.
However, the Institute decided to deliver rest of the modules of the FCs online, and convert a bleak situation into a pleasant learning opportunity. The Institute transferred its entire content and pedagogy online and reached it out to the OTs, spread over 175 different locations across the country.
While Covid-19 closed the doors on conventional training, online training opened innumerable avenues. The Institute no longer had the constraint to confine itself mainly to Hyderabad-based resource persons. Instead, it provided a unique opportunity to tap the services of a wider pool of resource persons both from India and abroad to address the OTs.
The OTs were provided access to “Udemy for Government”, an online portal having a bouquet of 4,000 courses. This intervention enabled them to diversify and enrich their knowledge, skills, and attitudes, and thereby enhance their productivity.
‘Need of the hour’
BP Acharya, DG of the Institute & Special Chief Secretary to the government, said: “While conventional training has got its own strengths, online training is the need of the hour, especially in the Post-Covid-19 scenario. The success of the foundation courses, via virtual mode, calls for its wider use for government employees in future,”
The Institute is one of the first training establishments to have successfully delivered two high-end FCs, combining both conventional and online modes, which amounted to having best of both the worlds.
Md Abbas Ali, Academic Coordinator, coordinated the virtual sessions by using such online platforms as Cisco WebEx as well as the indigenously developed “Impartus”. The course will end on May 15, 2020.
“We believe online education and learning seems to the be the way forward,” he told BusinessLine .
A Sridevi, Director, IT, said training institutions should develop their capacities to offer more online programmes, considering a huge surge in demand for them.
Eminent speakers, including Anil Swarup IAS (Retd) and KP Krishnan, IAS (Retd), former secretaries to the Government of India, distinguished members drawn from other segments, breaking national barriers and speakers from across the globe including Dr Narendar V Rao from Northeastern University of Illinois, US joined in to aid the training.
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