VCs' Meet:Distance education challenge to traditional univ

New Delhi, Dec 29 (UNI) Vice Chancellors of conventional universities, open universities and the Directors of Distance Education Institutes today unanimously agreed that distance education had not only challenged the traditional form of higher learning but had become more of a movement to overcome generic problems of scarcity and exclusivity of the traditional universities.

During the meeting, organised by the Distance Education Council, its Chairman and IGNOU Vice Chancellor Prof V N Rajasekharan Pillai said with the ascent of digital technology, all universities would transform themselves from universities of convocation to universities of convergence by adopting Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) in their learning processes.

Students would be more likely to select institutions based on relevance and quality of offerings, convenience and price rather than geography. The challenge before ODL system was not on how to be an alternative system but to develop knowledge-based human resources rather than simply being a mechanism to expand the existing educational system, he said.

What began as an experiment in the 1960s had become a well- established system with 15 single mode open universities and more than 130 dual mode universities, besides several professional bodies and corporate houses which were offering programmes through distance mode, he added.

UNI