The Ministry of Education(MoE) has officially launched online Annual Refresher Programme in Teaching (ARPIT) on 13th November, 2018, initiative of Online Professional Development of 15 lakhs Higher Education Faculty using the MOOC’s* platform SWAYAM*. For implementing ARPIT, 75 discipline-specific National Resource Centres (NRCs) were identified in the year 2018 and 48 discipline specific National Resource Centres (NRCs) in the year 2019, which were tasked to prepare online training material with focus on latest developments in the discipline, new & emerging trends, pedagogical improvements and methodologies for transacting revised curriculum. For ARPIT 2020, Ministry decided to rerun ARPIT-2019 courses in ARPIT-2020. The training materials is uploaded and made available through SWAYAM. The ARPIT will revolutionize professional development of faculty by catering to massive numbers by leveraging ICT and Online Technology platform of SWAYAM.
*MOOC’s : Massive Open Online Course
*SWAYAM : Study Web and Active Learning by Young and Aspiring minds.
UGC has notified equivalence of ARPIT as a refresher course for career advancement of faculty (DO Letter No. F.2-16/2002(PS)Pt.fI.II dated 3 December, 2018 ).During September 2019 till January 2020, second batch of 146214 ARPIT Candidates, have taken up the Online SWAYAM MOOCs Courses.