Vidyashankar S., Vice-Chancellor, KSOU, on Friday maintained that ‘unhealthy’ and ‘unfair’ practices by dual-mode or conventional universities were crippling the State Open Universities (SOUs). This is a matter of grave concern, he added.
In his address at the All India Open Universities’ Vice-Chancellors’ Conference at KSOU, he said the intention to give a fillip to the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER), with the National Education Policy aiming to push GER to 50% by 2035, has made dual-mode universities focus on Open Distance Learning (ODL) and online delivery. This has become a concern for the very existence of SOUs in India, he argued.
“Permission to dual-mode universities to run ODL programmes was done with GER targets in mind but conventional universities were seeing this opportunity to bump up revenue and were launching programmes without proper preparedness,” he claimed.
This was one of the main topics of discussion at the two-day conference.
Open universities, including KSOU, enjoyed an exclusive control over ODL till recently. However, the UGC ODL regulations of 2017 changed the scenario entirely, resulting in the open universities in the country facing dire consequences as a result, said Mr. Vidyashankar.
N.S. Rame Gowda, former V-C, KSOU, and one of the strongest critics of conventional universities running ODL programmes, said the interpretation being given for dual-mode universities to run ODL programmes was to increase their revenue to sustain them. This was absurd and unhealthy as they are not supposed to do a business through education.
Moreover, conventional universities were not spending fees collected from distance learners entirely on distance education system. This practice was also ‘unethical’ and contributed towards a decline in quality of the distance education programme, he observed.
