[2026] 500+ Swayam Plus Courses: Inside India’s Industry-Backed MOOC Platform

Less than two years after launch, India’s Swayam Plus has introduced a catalog of over 500 courses from 70+ industry and academic partners, a rapid buildout for a government platform that only went live in February 2024.

Swayam Plus was designed to solve a problem that India’s existing MOOC infrastructure hadn’t cracked: turning free online learning into employment outcomes. The original SWAYAM platform, which hosts 2,000+ free courses from NPTEL, UGC, and other national coordinators, had proven that Indians would enroll in MOOCs on a massive scale with 7.2 million enrollments by late 2023, up from 3.1 million in 2017. Combined with 2,000+ UGC-approved online degrees now available from Indian universities, the infrastructure for online higher education in India has never been more developed.

According to the Ministry of Education, the missing piece was a direct pipeline to industry. Swayam Plus, operated by IIT Madras in collaboration with L&T, Microsoft, and Cisco, was built to fill that gap. At launch, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan announced that the platform would offer “employability, entrepreneurial mode, and job-centric courses” with the goal of “making education industry-fit.” The platform would bring corporations into the course design process, align content with the National Credit Framework (NCrF), and expand access through multilingual delivery.

The stakes are substantial. India aims to reach a 50% higher education Gross Enrollment Ratio by 2035 and 65% by 2047, requiring 37 million and 66 million additional learners, respectively. Swayam Plus has partnered with industry players across IT, finance, healthcare, and manufacturing and begun integrating courses into university curricula, aiming to have more than 10,000 students from partner educational institutions earn academic credit through the platform in 2025.

These are the top partners by course count:

Wadhwani Foundation: 48 courses (all free)
L&T EduTech: 45 courses (73% paid)
TCS iON: 32 courses (69% free)
Microsoft: 28 courses (all free)
Medvarsity: 24 courses (79% paid).

The platform appears to still be in the development phase, with some basic technical issues such as broken links. Some courses are not open to enrollment, but the only way to discover this is to click the enrollment button. Also, the site is written in future tense with comments such as “SWAYAM Plus will be launched…”

Currently, not all courses offer certificates or academic credit. The goal of creating courses in local languages may still be in the early stages with only 14% of the catalog in languages other than English.

There are some confusing aspects. To enroll, you need to sign up and sign in to Swayam Plus, and also register with the partner institution that supplied the course. At the time of writing, the only options to sign into Swayam Plus are via Google or Microsoft but more options may be available when signing up for partner institutions.

Many courses’ enrollment button leads to a Google form, a broken link, or a partner website course/collection page. Sometimes, a “Pending Learner – Data Synchronisation on Partner LMS” message appears in a pop-up.

This process is different from the Swayam site, where you can easily join courses directly without further sign-in.

Another difference between Swayam and Swayam Plus is that not all courses on Swayam Plus are eligible for credit, whereas all current Swayam courses have credit. On both sites you can select Yes or No for a Course Credits or Credit Eligible filter. When you select the No Course Credits filter on Swayam, no courses appear. On Swayam Plus, the No Credit Eligible filter returns more than 300 courses.

Suparn collected metadata on all 500+ courses currently available on Swayam Plus to understand what the platform actually offers. Here’s what the data shows:

510 courses from 66 partners across 17 subject areas
57% free (289 courses), 43% paid (221 courses)
Paid course prices range from ₹9 to ₹20,000 (median: ₹2,500, average: ₹4,202)
34% are credit-eligible (173 courses), but 85% of these require payment
86% English-only; regional languages account for just 14% of the catalog
97% delivered fully online; only 8 courses each for hybrid and offline modes
73% lead to a certification; 18% are participation-based, 10% are micro-credentials
69% use non-proctored assessments; just 17% are proctored
The average course duration is 30.8 hours, and the median is 15 hours
Course lengths range from several courses under an hour up to 900 hours for the longest course (Advanced VLSI Design and Verification).