HYDERABAD: Students of open digital learning of Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) would reach to 50 lakh by 2025 from the current 30 lakh students, university vice chancellor Prof Ravindra Kumar said on Friday.
The university would add about 100 new courses in the next couple of months to the existing 232 programmes of 60 areas currently being offered by the university.
“There is wrong perception among the people that distance learning is an alternative way of learning. But it is a parallel method of conventional learning. The open universities are not compromising on the quality of education,” Ravindra Kumar said.
Ravindra Kumar told TOI that the university had already been providing services in digital mode right from filling up online application, payment of fees to providing material to Prof Ravin and would reach 100% digital in the coming years. “Every year, 10 lakh new students are being added in the open universities in the country. The only way of reaching them easily and speedily is through digital mode. The Centre had allotted five channels of IGNOU, of which four channels have already been launched for imparting edu cation to the stu dents,” the vice chancellor said.
He said the downloaded study material is now av ailable not only for students but also general public (e gyan kosh). The students of other universities can al so access the material from anywhere, the vice-chancellor said. The university has already set up Electronics Media Centre for taking digital and visual to the students.
The university was in fa vour of conducting online examination. Some universities such as Yashwanthrao Chavan Open University tried to conduct online four years ago, but University Grants Commission (UGC) stopped it.
On expanding services in Telangana through study centres, he said all the 31 districts would have study centres in near future as only 10 districts have study centres now. There is no truth to the fact that distance mode courses were helpful for certain courses. “Our PhD programmes were a huge hit with about 15,000 applied for the courses. But PhD is a regular course not distance mode of research,” the vice-chancellor said.
[“Source-timesofindia”]
