Content area
Full Text
Open educational resources coupled with the increasing capabilities of the Internet would offer new dimensionality to distance education by facilitating extensive access to globally created educational resources to serve the knowledge needs of diverse communities. The National Knowledge Commission's recommendations on education have addressed a variety of topics and issues, including distance education and institutional governance.
Changing educational paradigm
Open and Distance Learning (ODL) is one of the most rapidly growing fields of education. ODL has brought together a range of technologies that have enabled teachers and learners to overcome barriers in distance and time. These technologies have enabled distance teachers and learners who are separated by distance to communicate with each other in real time (synchronous) and delayed time (asynchronous). A direct outcome of this indicates that access to education and learning opportunities are now suited to individual lifestyles, learning preferences and personal development plans.
According to Dr Neeta Kapai, Deputy Director, Campus Placement Cell, Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), "Distance education at IGNOU has been democratizing the dissemination of quality education for all. With the aim of providing employability skills, we impart training to the youth through common service centres which are technologically enabled. We have a tie-up with NIS Sparta wherein we will be training youth belonging to the weaker sections in 5 different states through these common service centres. The objective of the distance programme is to reach out to the un-reached population and provide job placements. We have similar collaborations with other corporates for the purpose of dissemination of education and training."
As Dr Sunita Raju, Senior Chairperson at the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT) elaborates on the role of distance learning at IIFT, "Courses at IIFT are conducted both through classroom lectures and by adopting distance learning- the blended learning approach. We have tied up with NIIT Ltd. and Hughes Communications for the purpose. We take every effort to ensure that the distance education classes get the same value added options which the classroom teachings get. We also have good provisions for receiving...