As part of the World Bank’s India Africa Knowledge Exchange Series on 18th December 2020, Ms Anita Karwal, Secretary, Department of School Education and Literacy, Ministry of Human Resource Development was invited to make a presentation on DIKSHA. 

The session titled “DIKSHA- Learnings from India Experience” presented India’s ongoing story of digital innovation in education. It touched upon all aspects of DIKSHA; architecture, technology, policy, program, technology. 

DIKSHA (Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing) is a national platform for school education, an initiative of National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT), Ministry of Education. DIKSHA was developed based on the core principles of open architecture, open access, open licensing diversity, choice and autonomy. DIKSHA is built on open source technology, made in India and made for India, which incorporates internet scale technologies and enables several use-cases and solutions for teaching and learning. DIKSHA is built using MIT licensed open source technology called Sunbird, which is a digital infrastructure for learning and is designed to support multiple languages and solutions. 

Sunbird is a set of configurable, extendable, modular building blocks for learning and human development designed for scale and open sourced under MIT license. 

It is designed to support multiple languages and multiple teaching and learning solutions by providing the building blocks for the development of platforms and learning solutions to suit various use cases, contexts and needs. It can be used by any organisation, be it government, non-profit, or private. 

Sunbird has been developed by EkStep Foundation to fulfil its education mission to enhance access to learning opportunities at scale for millions of learners particularly in the K-12 space. The Sunbird community is growing with adoption and contributions from various individuals and organisations. Sunbird building blocks are being used in diverse areas such as education, health, lifelong learning, among others.