In an attempt to ensure that there is no hiatus in student education during the ongoing lockdown, Govt of India’s All India Council of Technical Education - NEAT announced partnership with Chennai based Edtech startup Skill-Lync. The global startup Skill-Lync is first-of-its-kind engineering technical education platform that provides job leading courses for Mechanical, Electrical and Civil Engineering students in India and across the world.

During COVID19 outbreak, under this partnership, Skill-Lync has opened up its Rs. 50,000. worth Mechanical Engineers Essentials program to students from AICTE. Interestingly, they’ve had over 15000 subscribers to their free online coursework in the last two weeks itself and the number is growing by the day.

Given the extended at-home learning requirements that the industry is catering to, this partnership is aimed at accelerating the online learning process for mechanical, electrical & civil engineering students. Until now most computer science students had access to coding platforms that taught them industry relevant skills. But a lot of non-software core engineering domains missed out on this. This also accelerates the adoption of online learning for non-software engineering domains.

There is a great amount of push from the government to safeguard student education including professional & technical skills. Recently, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced the immediate launch of 'Pradhan Mantri e-VIDYA' initiative for digital education which is likely to give a boost to Edtech startups across the nation.

Speaking on the announcement, Surya P, Co-founder & CEO, Skill-Lync, said, “Our aim is to provide students access to in-depth technical skill sets that would give them a good exposure to industry oriented problems and how it gets solved. We want to ensure that students get exposed to all the technical skills that industries are/will look for. This introductory set of courses allows engineers to get a clear idea about what domain that they need to specialize in as they enter into their professional career. During these tough times, the right use of digital technologies can go a long way in achieving the goals laid out by the government. This partnership with AICTE is to support Government’s initiatives in enhancing digital learning and deal with the ‘new normal’ in an efficient way.”

Talking about the courses, Surya added, “Currently we are offering free courses and live bootcamps every week. These are specially designed for learning Matlab & Python for Mechanical Engineers, CFD using SolidWorks, FEA using SolidWorks and MBD using SolidWorks. These courses provide a good amount of introductory knowledge in numerical simulation, computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis and multi body dynamics.”

Amidst COVID, Skill-Lync saw 6-fold growth in its subscribers as compared to last month. The interesting thing is not only did they see traffic coming in from India, but had users signing up for the course from US, Europe and Asia. Last month the startup released a Masters in Electric Vehicle Design and Simulations coursework, which is India’s first Master course to focus in the area of EV.