President Ram Nath Kovind on Saturday asked the country’s higher education institutions to use technology to offer open online courses and devise new courses to answer the needs of the next 25-30 years.

Addressing the 94th Convocation of University of Delhi, Kovind highlighted that capacity of physical classrooms was limited and internet should be put to use to educate the country’s youth.

“Capacity of physical classrooms is limited. As broadband penetration deepens, open online courses have the exciting potential to democratise education,” Kovind said.

Pointing out that India is “youthful nation” where 65 per cent of the population is below 35 years, Kovind said the challenges before educational institutions will be different in the coming years.

“New courses and programmes will have to be devised if our education system is to answer the needs of the next 25-30 years. Some of these may call for a multi-disciplinary or inter-disciplinary approach,” he said.

He further said that higher education was becoming “increasingly competitive” and Universities must not lose sight of long term goal of building knowledge and innovation society.

“Higher studies prepare students for the job market but at the end of the day Universities are truly meaningful if they promote the adventure of learning and exploration of knowledge,” he said.

The president said that under National Institutional Ranking Framework six colleges of the University of Delhi are ranked in the first 10 in our country which is a commendable performance but the focus must be on how Delhi University can figure in the list of World’s top 200 Universities.

At the convocation ceremony, Kovind presented 171 medals and prizes to students of which 112 were girls – almost a two-thirds majority.

“This is in keeping with the trend in education of girls consistently outscoring boys. A welcome sign in our society,” he said.

The University of Delhi was established in 1922 and had a modest beginning with just three colleges, two disciplines and 750 students.

Today, it is one of the largest universities in the world with 54,000 undergraduate and 10,000 post-graduate students.

It comprises of 16 disciplines, which includes medicine and technology and has 86 academic departments while 77 colleges and 28 centers and institutes are affiliated to it.