IDT in India

One of the countries that I am most interested in relative to IDT is India.  I found two resources that discussed various aspects of IDT in India, specifically in terms of distance education.  According to Rao (2006), 44% of the population in India is illiterate and only 7% of the population attends college.  One of the ways that the government attempted to address the educational needs of a large segment of society is to use distance education (DE).  The trend I am interested in is the uses of DE by developing countries to address the vocational and educational needs of a large and diverse population.  In India, the government invested in the “open university” concept (though some say it was imported from Western Europe).  There are 10 major open universities in India and 64 correspondence institutes that are affiliated with colleges.  The major open university that is the “flagship” institution is the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) in New Delhi.   IGNOU serves over one million learners in India and almost another million in 30 other countries.  

One aspect of the trend to use open universities in developing countries is due to the economic feasibility of delivering education resources to under-served populations across large rural regions.  This is really the only mode of education that can be used to increase literacy in remote areas as well as provide vocational skills to large numbers of people who have no access to training centers. The mechanisms of providing DE in India range from correspondence materials sent through the mail to dedicated satellites that serve the broadcasting and internet needs of academia and government.  A number of DE programs use the broadcast component to deliver educational programs to student via television and FM radio. One of the issues with DE in India is that only 2% of the faculty involved in De is full-time university faculty while 91% are part-time tutors.  This translates into 13,00 unsupervised part-time individuals basically providing educational services for the entire De effort.  Unfortunately it seems that most of the people that access DE in India are males who already have a degree and are looking for a way to enhance their career possibilities.  The population who initially were supposed to be served simply cannot access the courses.  One of the most positive aspects of India’s DE system is that there are 10 other open universities that collaborate with IGNOU and these groups are spread across regions in India to serve populations who have language and cultural differences.

In an article by Alcorn, Christensen, & Kapur (2015), MOOCs were investigated as part of the DE trend in India.  MOOCs were seen to have the potential to address the educational needs of India’s various regions and geographies, and were supposed to be transformative for the higher educational system there.  Again, as shown in the previous summary, access became an issue.  Access to English, access to the internet, access to an education that could help an individual take advance of a MOOC resource—these were all obstacles for large numbers of Indians.  In addition, another of the obstacles to the possibilities of MOOCs was the uneven quality of the courses and instructors due to issues regarding regulation.  Barely 30% of those with credentials from MOOC DE were employable after graduation.  A massive lack of qualified personnel seemed to result in the current failure of the MOOC approach to provide the impact that was hoped for initially.  Some suggestions to address the gap were to deliver MOOC material to mobile phones, to customize the programs for local languages, and to build communities of students who could support each other with peer-to-peer learning.  I will be following this trend eagerly!

References

Alcorn, B., Christensen, G., & Kapur, D. (2015).  Higher education and MOOCs in India and the Global South.  Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 47(3), 42-49.

Rao, S. (2006). Distance education and the role of IT in India.  The Electronic Library, 24(2), 225-236.