A novel initiative in education

Updated on: Tuesday, September 08, 2009

The government has announced the setting up of the Kerala Open University in the coming academic year. Ram Takwale, the founder of the open university in Maharasthra was the Chairman of the three-member committee that conducted a feasibility study of such a university and recommended its establishment. Soon after submitting the report, Professor Takwale discussed with The Hindu-EducationPlus his vision of an open university, the need for the KOU to have a ‘Future Now’ model of operations and the need for setting up a separate body to run that university.

•The committee mainly considered the following points while finalising the report:

•The poor quality of learning support to distance education and to private students.

•The unmet demands of those who have cleared high school and of those who have dropped out of school.

•The need to complement the restructured courses initiated by the Kerala State Higher Education Council

•The need for continuing education for all youth and adults to provide a life-long learning linked with living, working and development.

•Need for quality and relevance, learner choices and capacity building in education.

•The need for translating the core values and principles of social organizations given in the preamble to the Indian Constitution

•‘Massification’ of programmes along with personalization of education through offering a level play field to all and by empowering the disadvantaged.

Excerpts from the interview:
Could you elaborate on the ‘Future Now’ model of the proposed Kerala Open University?

It is better not to establish a KOU if it is going to function in the traditional governmental mode, files, bureaucracy and so on. It has to have a ‘Future Now’ mode, a 21st century style of functioning. The committee has told the government that the cyber infrastructure of the university, the e-platform on which the university would conduct all its operations needs to get established first.

The cyber infrastructure should be such that it can easily absorb any developments or changes in technology. Only then can the university deliver the requirements of an information society.

The KOU is going to use the process of the information society—virtualisation, digitisation, mass-personalisation, mass collaboration, the open resource movement and so on. The idea is to link education with development so that eventually there is social transformation.

The new university should have a minimal bureaucracy. It would be good to set up a separate body to run the university.

In Maharashtra, the government set up the Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation. Kerala can find its own model. But a separate body that can take quick decisions is needed to run the university efficiently.

In Maharashtra, the government gave just about Rs.2 crore for the nascent Open University. The content delivery was by private providers. But because of the way the university is run, its operational culture which is not a traditional government culture, it is able to run profitably without charging very high fee.
How would the KOU function in the connected community mode?

Initially the content for KOU courses would be created by serving teachers in state universities. Eventually anyone, through wiki-processes, can become a contributor to that store of knowledge.

The services of those teaching in private tutorials now can also be considered. Anybody who feels that he or she has some knowledge that the society can use, is free to put up that knowledge in an open format.

These course teams would put the content they develop as Reusable Learning Objects and create a meta-database of Learning Objects.

They would also deploy these courses in the Learning Management System of the KOU. Already there are bodies of open resources and these would also be used.

The KOU would have study centres which would facilitate connected and distributed classrooms. The mentors at the study centres would be the teachers-in-contact of the university. While the KOU tutors would be connected virtually with the students, the mentors would be in face to face contact. Learning would take place in small groups. In fact KOU would seek to nurture cooperative learning—production learning and service learning—beginning from a small group to learners leading up to mass collaboration. The KOU’s evaluation would be two-pronged. It would be based on the performance of the individual and also that of his group.

A novel initiative in education

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