Sunday Posts

Remember the good old correspondence courses, which everyone hated but everyone else still  took? Something that became the pathway to easy qualifications - but were also notorious for poor education? Usually synonymous to scams, as stories such as Graham Greene's When Greek Meets Greek (1954) depict, correspondence education, in many ways, was the precursor of today's For-Profit institutions. And, in many cases, and notwithstanding the University of London's pioneering External Programme that started in the nineteenth century, established universities only caught up with it much later. Indeed, since then, correspondence education has really evolved - the innovation led by Britain's Open University is a case in example - but it has somehow never escaped the stigma attached to it. In India, one of the world's largest market for correspondence education, it is usually, and perhaps justifiably, treated as sub par (formally) - and often the programmes are badly design...

A Great British Institution This essay is about the creation of The Open University [OU]. Bill Bryson, an American living in England, lists OU among the great, uniquely British contributions to the World, along with William Shakespeare, Christopher Wren, Chocolate Digestive biscuits and Pork Pies (Bryson, 1996). David L Kirp, a modern American commentator on Higher Education, compares the founding of OU with the opening of the land grant universities in the United States a century earlier, as “both developments provided serious and sustained learning opportunities for large number of people for whom Higher Education had never previously been available”. He also concedes, quoting Walter Perry, the first Vice Chancellor of the OU, that of the two events, OU’s story was more remarkable, as the land grant schools “took at least seventy five years to achieve a fully established place in the American society, while [OU] had to be brought into full-scale operation almost instantaneo...

Social Learning is the current rage. That's the keyword the Learning Technology providers are clinging on to, the knight in the shining armour who would rescue the stricken companies in the middle of this unending downturn. Learning is invariably social, and even those theorists who would primarily look at the learner as the key driver for all learning activities, can not rule out the role the social context plays. Or, the shared context, as in a classroom, where lot of actual learning happens through interactions between learners or by absorbing another person's point of view of the same learning input. The technology-mediated learning is devoid of this, mostly, because, for all its advantages, e-Learning is mostly a solitary activity. This leaves it with a crippling limitation. While the e-learning content can be quite engaging, without the social context, learning loses fun, inspiration and ability to inspire thoughts. This may be okay to impart instructions, areas where act...

I had an interesting conversation on the scope of e-Learning and how much it will replace the traditional classroom training in the next five years. Obviously, there were many sceptics in the group, and they were pushing the opinion that e-Learning is not nearly as good or effective as someone standing up to teach. However, it was heartening to note that most people saw the argument for what it is - a passionate plea for horse-drawn cars when automobile has started coming to the market - and the fact that usually it is comparing some basic e-learning efforts with some very good teachers. The general opinion, therefore, was that e-learning will continue to expand in scope and possibly replace most of what is done in classrooms today. The panel touched upon various media comparison studies, which proved, over a number of years [starting 1947, when such a study was first carried out, a comparison between video, paper-based and classroom training] that the learning outcomes do not vary sig...

In India, Distance Learning is a rage. Though the Indian tertiary education infrastructure has expanded quite a bit in the recent years, it can not still do justice to the huge population, the upwardly mobile middle class and the insatiable demand for degrees in Indian families. So, distance learning steps in, offering an easy and flexible way for the commoner to get an advanced degree. When I say Distance Learning here, I am combining Open and Distance Learning under the same label - because, in India, these two terms are used interchangeably and without a real distinction. There are specific universities, in every state as well as at the national level, set up for Open Learning. But they function like any other university, requiring a level of formal education as the pre -requisite to entry, a mass of paperwork to go through its courses and a number of pen and paper examinations at every level. Distance Learning, by contrast, is only a term variation, offered by brick-and-mortar uni...