The Ministry of Education has selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to modernise national education technology platform Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing (DIKSHA), the company said on Wednesday.
The migration will help make DIKSHA more accessible and lower its IT costs. The platform supports 1.48 million schools across 35 states and Union Territories and is available in 36 Indian languages. “We have transformed and migrated DIKSHA onto Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI),” said Shailender Kumar, senior vice-president and regional managing director, Oracle India and NetSuite Asia Pacific and Japan, at a briefing.
Under the seven-year collaboration pact, OCI will help the ministry use DIKSHA to provide educational resources to millions of additional students, teachers and collaborators across the country. DIKSHA was built for school education and foundational learning programmes and represents one of India’s largest and most successful Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) initiatives. Using the open-source platform Sunbird — developed by the EkStep Foundation — DIKSHA helps teachers support inclusive learning for underserved communities and disabled students across the country.
More than 200 million students and seven million teachers from government and private schools access content from more than 11,000 contributors. Users of the platform stream 1.2 petabytes of text and video content per day from sources such as the National Council of Educational Research & Training (NCERT), Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERTs). Since it recently shifted to OCI, DIKSHA has gained more scalability, security, cost-effectiveness, and the ability to adjust to demand-based capacity, enabling it to deliver more content and serve more students and teachers as the platform expands, the company said in a release.
“We need to embrace modern tools and technology to make education more easily available and securely accessible to everyone,” said Indu Kumar, head of department, ICT and Training, Central Institute of Educational Technology (CIET), National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), Ministry of Education. An AI-based chatbot on DIKSHA too is in the offing and will be put in place “as soon as possible”. This will allow users to ask questions in any language. On data breach reports and the measures put in place to safeguard user data, Indu Kumar asserted that a security audit of DIKSHA was done after the said incident.
“That incident was also investigated by us with technical team in place, and it was found that there was no such data breach there,” she said. Post the reported incident “we underwent security audit of Diksha and we made sure there is no such security breach on Diksha and Oracle is also ensuring it”. Further, she said that several countries, including Malawi (in East Africa), have shown keen interest in replicating the DIKSHA platform, for their teaching-learning environments.
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