Efforts to have common curriculum for all open universities

Updated on: Friday, May 11, 2012

IGNOU is making efforts to have a common curriculum for all the Open Universities (OU) in the country. The move has been made to meet the national agenda set by MHRD to have quality education, while pushing the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in higher education.

The university’s Inter University Consortium (IUC) had recently organised a meeting of VCs of all the OUs on campus to discuss the strategy for formulating a common curriculum for open and distance learning. In order to meet the MHRD agenda, the authorities decided on having a three-pronged strategy. This will include formulating a common curriculum for UG courses, creating open education resource available to all via a web portal and generating curriculum-based multimedia e-content.

According to Vibha Puri Das, secretary, department of higher education, MHRD, all OUs must collaborate in order to enhance the GER across the country. Also, emphasis should be on faculty development, teacher training and research in universities. The objectives of IUC for the programme include experimenting with technology at the universities and making a judicious use of both media and technology for distance education learning.

For implementation of the programme, Madhu Prahar, director, IUC, IGNOU, says, “There will be a common syllabus. To begin with, as a pilot project, a common curriculum can be developed for the three UG programmes. Also, teacher-training will focus on the use of new technology.”

The programme is one of the key pillars of the 12th Five-Year Plan, which includes building a national vocational education framework as well as producing employable manpower.

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