The Kerala State Higher Education Council has recommended the formation of an Open University in the State to offer new-generation job-orientated courses and meet the high demand for advanced courses, in newly emerging areas, to cope with the fast- developing areas of knowledge and technology.
The council has pointed out that formation of an Open University would help delink the distance/private modes from the regular stream and would relieve the universities of the immense administrative and logistical burden of distance/private mode courses. Starting an Open University, as has been done in many other States, would help accommodate not only the younger generation, but also various sections that would like to pursue higher education at a later stage in their life, the council has pointed out.
The immediate reason for the State contemplating formation of an Open University is the University Grants Commission’s insistence that only higher education institutions that have valid NAAC accreditation of A+ grade, with a minimum CGPA of 3.26 on a 4 point scale, would be granted recognition to run Open and Distance Learning (ODL) programmes in future.
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The four universities running distance education courses in Kerala have their NAAC grades as follows: University of Kerala, Mahatma Gandhi and Calicut University A grade (CGPA-3.01-3.25), and Kannur University B grade (CGPA-2.01-2.50). In this context, all these institutions would have to make fresh application for recognition of their ODL programmes.
In 2013, the UGC had temporarily suspended the distance education courses conducted by these universities for violating its directive that distance education courses can be conducted only in the university’s territorial jurisdiction and that courses may be conducted by universities directly, not through franchisees.
Though the programmes were later resumed, it had created great chaos among the student community, especially abroad. Further, all the universities in the State have been finding it hard to provide seats to all the students who become eligible for higher education.
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The enrolment to undergraduate courses in the arts and science colleges under the four universities was 2.7 lakh in 2017, while about 3.27 lakh of students had become eligible for higher studies from higher secondary and vocational higher secondary institutions. This year, for the 56,000 undergraduate seats in the regular mode in Calicut University, there were 1,31,979 applicants and hence more than 75,000 students could not obtain admission in the year 2018-19.