A Case for Distance Education Universities in British India have a 145 - years old history. On the recommendations of the Wood's Despatch (1854), three Universities were established, one each in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. These were supposed to be on the lines of London University, which then was a purely examining body, non-resident and non-teaching in its basic character. The Punjab and the Allahabad universities were incorporated on the lines of the old universities in 1882 and 1887 respectively. By 1901-02, there was a very rapid expansion of college education. As against 68 colleges in 1881-82, there were 179 affiliated colleges in 1901-02, 138 in the so-called British India, 32 in Indian princely states and 9 in Ceylon. In 1902, during Lord Curzon's Viceroyalty, the India University Commission was appointed. The recommendations of this Commission gave birth to the Indian Universities Act of 1904. Within ten years of this Act, however, the position changed vastly and new Universities had to be started. In 1916, Banaras and Mysore came into being. Into 1917, Patna became the seat of a new university. The same year saw the emergence of the S.N.D.T. Women's University at Bombay, followed closely, the next year, by a university at Hyderabad. In 1916, the Calcutta University started post-graduate departments where direct university involvement in teaching, transcending its affiliating or examining character, was witnessed for the first time. The Calcutta University Commission recommendation brought about a sea change in the scene of higher education in India. A number of new universities sprang up. These included Dhacca and Rangoon in 1920, Aligarh and Lucknow in 1921, Delhi in 1922, Travancore in 1937, Utkal in 1943, Sagar in 1946 and Sind as also Rajputana in 1947. This is the short history of higher education in India during the British period. Since enrolment in various courses in inalienably related to the manpower needs in terms of the faculty strength, the projected increase in the vital sector of higher education can be easily predicted. Given 80 students per faculty member, an additional number of 68,000 new faculty members and 1,480 additional arts, science and commerce colleges will be needed every five years. Understandably, therefore, the Education Commission observed in June 1966 : "If the present rate of expansion (10% a year) is assumed to continue for the next 20 years, the total enrolment in higher education would be between 7 and 8 million by 1985-86 or more than twice the estimated requirements for manpower for national development. An economy like ours can neither have the funds to expand higher education at this scale nor the capacity to find suitable employment for the millions of graduates who come out of the educational system at this level of enrolment." The essence of the matter is that the existing educational apparatus has reached a point of saturation beyond which it can be stretched only with danger both to the system and to the economy of the country. While on the one hand the solution may lie in faster economic growth, on the other it lies in diversification of the modes of education which at present remain deeply embedded in the traditional soil. One way out is the expansion and steady growth of non-traditional modes. "So long as the basic imbalances persist, there is no escape from containing the enrolment within available resources while stretching the resources to the utmost through part-time and correspondence or distance education". The Education Commission in this connection observed : "An economy like ours can neither have the funds to expand higher education on this scale nor the capacity to find suitable employment for the millions of graduates who would come annually out of the educational system at this level on enrolment." The Commission was of the view that admission to the institutions of higher education should be made selective. This view, no doubt tenable from one angle, was found unacceptable by political pundits who held the reigns of power. They opined that the development of a democracy primarily depends on the quality and quanta of education which a State can give to its citizens. Indeed, the observation had been made in almost all the five year plans. Back to Top Education is the most important single factor in achieving rapid economic development and technological progress and in creating a social order founded on the values of freedom, social justice and equal opportunity.... It has been one of the major aims of the Five Year Plans to expand and intensify the education effort so that from now on, in all branches of national life, education becomes the focal point of planned development. This view, contrary to the Kothari Commission Report, was held by many educationists also. But the stresses and strains of a stagnant economy, which had to be further subjected to wasteful expenditure of a nature and magnitude unheard of, were factors responsible not only for the reasons behind the Kothari Commission's view, but also for others who thought in the same manner. It was also recommended that the admissions to colleges should be open only to those who 'deserved being in a college'. However, the statistics again made a nonsense of what was being thought of at the levels of planning and implementation. It is a statistical fact that only one in every forty men of the age-group 20-25 now goes to the college. Even if the stipulated increase in the number of college-going students become a hard fact by 2000, the ratio of college-going and non-college-going students will not change. Thus every time 39 students will prefer not to go to a college, only one will do so. Will it be worthwhile or even desirable to shut the gates of colleges to some of the 25 young men or women out of a thousand of the relevant age-group in the Indian population who want to seek admission ? In an egalitarian society it becomes more of an imperative than a choice to throw open avenues of betterment to all those who desire. Whether or not they deserve is a question which should engage attention either in a totalitarian state or in an absolute, monarchical order of things. Naturally, therefore, the Report of the Education Commission (1964-65) had given detailed comments on the equalization of educational opportunities. It has said that inequalities of educational opportunities arise in various ways which include the non-location of institutes of higher learning in rural, hilly or backward areas. While the recommendation of the Commission was "this handicap should be overcome by the widest dispersal of educational institutions, consistent with economy and efficiency," it also noted with dismay that "another cause of inequality of educational opportunity is the poverty of large sections of the population and the relative affluence of a small minority" with the result that "even in the neighbourhood of an educational institution, children from poor families do not have the same chance as those who come from, richer ones". Among other recommendations such as the progressive abolition of fee, provision for free books and scholarship, the Commission stressed the need for the Indian universities to take upon their shoulders the task of community service, through adult education programmes, extension lectures, correspondence courses and establishment of evening institutions. About programmes of adult education, it said : Another special responsibility of the Indian universities is to develop programmes of adult education in a big way, and to that end, evolve widespread network of part-time and correspondence courses. The universities have to provide these courses in all their faculties, not only as extramural preparation for their examinations, but also as programmes of in-service education if professional workers in all walks of life. General adult education programmes are also needed to create a unity of outlook and faith between the masses and the intelligentsia. The concept of a university may be defined as "an organised and degree giving institution, intended for the study and advancement of higher branches of learning, self-governing in its nature, and, to a greater or lesser extent, national in scope". The university may further be defined as "a corporation or society which devotes itself to a search after knowledge for the sake of its intrinsic value". Neither of the two definitions enable it appropriate to include the 'methodology' or 'medium' of teaching to be of such intrinsic value to be incorporated in the definition of university. However, today's university has a greater role to play than - say - the ancient universities of Takshashila and Nalanda or stadium generale of Bologna, Salamanca, Paris, Oxford or Prague. Let us understand the point this way. It is a national institution, hence it cannot keep itself aloof from the main currents of national life. If cannot become recluse in its 'ivory tower' of culture. It will have to bring its policies and programmes into line with social and national problems, and keep itself in contact with the needs of all sections of our population, well-educated and illiterate, workmen and labourers, artisans and farmers. In short, it should provide suitable extension programmes too. Thus, a university in Free India will have four main functions : (i) instruction, (2) research, (3) affiliation, and (4) extension. Under 'extension', comes adult education programmes and community service. The initiation of correspondence courses is a part of the extension of the university to the doorstep of the receiver. It is the university that goes out into the community to meet its student and not the students who come to the university. Unless the university, without diverting its attention from higher goals of research and accumulation of knowledge, pays due attention to correspondence and continuing education, it is likely to end up as a study in decay. The University in essence is a living organism, and is inevitable subject to the principles of is a living organism, and is inevitable subject to the principles of evolution. It cannot remain static. To do so would be to perish. Back to Top In the USA, Carnegie Commission Reports (in thirteen volumes) suggest a blueprint for some fundamental academic reforms and reveal certain great new opportunities that lie before higher education. The major theme adumbrated therein relates to sufficient open access to opportunities for all who wish to have post-secondary education besides measures to overcome educational disadvantages due to race, sex, economic deprivation and inadequacies of prior schooling. Besides, the Open Door Community Colleges have been recommended to be spread across the nation with a view to providing for comprehensive type of education serving both academic and occupational interests. Stress has also been laid on encouraging the widespread use of the new educational technology to greatly enrich post-secondary education and to help people learn, as and when they wish, even beyond the traditional campus, to enable them to enhance their lives, professionally and academically. The new emphasis is on the development of individual human capabilities to enhance the quality of life in all its aspects and to enhance individual and social well-being. What according to the Carnegie Commission Reports is good for U.S.A. is still better for India. An elementary proposition if the sociology of education suggests that education is an important channel to the social and economic rewards of society. It is essential to the economy and it is a large-scale and highly visible organisation. For these reasons education is controlled by the dominant groups of society so as to meet their definition of society's priorities. It would not be far wrong to say that this is what exactly happened in the traditional system of education in India. At the university stage, more than 70 percent of the seats are taken by the top 5 percent of the social strata. Educational development, particularly at the Secondary and higher stages, is benefiting the 'haves' more than 'have-nots'. This is a negation of social justice. The elitist bias in higher education has indeed been more marked in India than in the western countries. It was quite appropriate in the British India for educationists to think of a three-fold-significance of the work of the Universities - teaching, research and service to the society. However, the position has changed considerably since then and new pulls and pressures of an egalitarian society committed to the programme of social welfare have made it abundantly incumbent upon the universities to expand this programme. The elitist bias in higher education can indeed be minimised through universal education which should bring the university out of its ivory-tower isolation to the very door step of the student. The three-fold programme of the traditional university own includes a fourth goal - the goal of adult literacy, converting itself into continuing education for the adult in the course of time. The Education Commission once again paid attention to the problem and recommended in a later paragraph : At present, a student at the undergraduate stage must either be admitted to a full-time basis or go without education altogether. This creates a great demand for full-time seats in colleges and leads to a deterioration of standards as the resources to provide all the seats needed are not available. Once solution to this is to keep full-time seats strictly limited on the basis of resources available and institute correspondence courses, part-time courses, evening courses etc. for those who aspire to a university degree but are not able to get admission to the regular courses. This device is being increasingly used in many countries such as the USA, the UK and Japan. The correspondence / distance education courses recently started by the many universities have proved to be a promising experiment and are producing satisfactory examination results. Correspondence courses, in addition to the provision by Universities of regular part-time courses through evening colleges and other institutes, were visualised in the context of (a) an ever-growing number of students who want to seek higher education; (b) non-availability of seats in the existing colleges and university departments which have already reached a saturation point; (c) throwing open of opportunities of higher education to all who desire and deserve; (d) doing away with the need of opening institutions of higher education in remote corners, hilly areas and other places where a sufficient number of students may not be available and hence opening of colleges would be economically unwise; (e) providing dropouts a fresh start in their academic career if they have taken up jobs, and (f) relying mainly on the existing faculty of parent departments for designing courses and tailoring reading material for distant students thereby not adding considerably to the faculty strength. At present, the parent universities which have established correspondence courses as multi-channel extension limbs have not taken into account the basic philosophical premise of correspondence education for giving them independence and autonomy from the inflexible course meant for regular students. There is a rigidity born of highbrow and stiff-collar attitudes. No attention has been paid, for example, to tailoring of new courses, flexible enough to have sufficient elbow room for academic reactivity, meant primarily for those 'academic orphans' who have failed to get seats in regular courses obviously on account of socio-economic compulsions. "The scope of correspondence education (in India) has remained narrow. It has got to be widened. For this purpose, new courses have to be designed keeping in mind the need of our society. Such courses should specially be linked to job requirements. Though the aims of correspondence instruction and those of oral teaching are the same, the incitements, motives and methods differ. In oral teaching it is the established equation of the physical presence of the teacher and the taught in a given point in space and time which holds good only for that environment. In correspondence study, the equation of physical absence of oral communication makes it possible for the written and printed work to be employed as a vehicle for the dissemination of knowledge. Such a course of study transcends the physical limitations imposed on classroom teaching. It is with this end in view that governments and educational bodies have become increasingly aware of the possibilities offered by correspondence education and the record success of its programmes all over the world has strengthened the faith of educationists. Back to Top The traditional classroom teaching, as is evident, is a hang-over from the days of Plato and Aristotle. The golden age of Greek learning or the equally lustrous age of Indian scholarship in our hoary past conceptualised higher teaching as some thing fixed in the place where the wisdom-giver had his ashrama or his academy. The physical limitations of distance, scanty means of travel and lack of facilities for a number of students to work as in-scholars made it impossible for more than a selected few to sit at the feet of the master and learn. Nonetheless many flocked to the fountain-head to get wisdom. The very name Upanishadas (near sitting) symbolised the cadre of those who sat nearer to the wisdom-giver or the guru with their folded knees to imbibe his teaching. Suffice to say that but for the diligence of his pupils, the notes of Aristole's Poetics or Manu's code known as 'Manusmriti' and some other great works would have been lost to us. Education, throughout the intervening centuries, remained the prerogative and monopoly of those who could claim it by virtue of their higher birth or whole time life-long vocation. This indeed was true of the pre-Independence period because institutions of higher education were so few as to thwart the aspirations of many. But in spite of the great multiplication of the number of colleges as also their proliferation in the back belts of the known urban centres in India, the number of those who desire and deserve a seat in a higher study course has mounted manifold. The socio-economic compulsions may thwart the aspirations of millions from higher education today. This particularly true of a big country like India with its large land-mass and teeming population living in rural areas. As it is, universities and affiliated colleges can function only in towns and cities, away from the interior rural landscape, isolating the student community living in villages from the process of continuing education. Another socio-economic compulsion which cripples the aspirations of a large body of our youth is the seasonal employment or under-employment in a vocation which they have either inherited as their partimony (though a rigid caste-system which still holds its sway) or for the reason that they are compelled to eke out an existence solely because they are born at a certain place. Hill-folk in India, as sociologists will testify, still retain almost a racial compulsion to get their last rites at the place of their birth. The bulk of these under-employed, partly-employed or seasonally-employed young men and women cannot pursue a regular course of study in a college whereby they have to leave their village based life for a three-year sojourn in a city. It is befitting, therefore, that correspondence education should cater to this significant but ignored segment of humanity by reaching out to millions who work for their living and to those who do not have an institution in their geographical proximity. A change in the educational technology, of which the introduction of correspondence or distance education is but a significant part, becomes imperative seen in the context of the education scene in India. This question has indeed received very little consideration at the hands of planners in the last fifty years and it was only with the advent of the nineties that a serious note was taken by policy-framers and planners to the central level while States which zealously guarded the realm of education as a State subject merely wasted time. A typical class of one teacher attached to 60 or 80 students using textbooks is the prototype of the traditional classroom method. Absence of programmed learning though which teaching-learning apparatus could have been systematised leads to further pigmentation of an already hardened system in which formal education, apronstring-tied to degrees or diplomas linked with job-qualifications, rather than with job-requirements, become the summum bonum of education. Programmed learning within or on the periphery of the framework of a formal system can, by itself, reduce some of the burden. It can systematise learning considerably in many of its aspects and increase average class size of pupil-teacher ratio. Its requirements indeed would be highly professionalised manpower of programmes which would substitute for any very great improvement on the present formal education-intellectual competence of the teacher or the receptivity calibre of the pupils. Education being a labour-intensive industry in the context of a developing country like India, a rapid technical change requires higher capital layout. Denied this, we have to fall back upon the home-made and indigenous systems which may come up to the modern level if they are given a fair deal of help and assistance. Whether it is the stress on productive work (earn while you learn - a cliche, but also a hard reality), or the fundamental change in the medium of teaching, the system has to be carried along in the changes of educational technology relevant to the Indian situation. But it is obvious that rapid technical change has to be carried out in education if, within the resources constraints that exist, much larger educational outcomes are sought to be achieved. In a country of the magnitude of India, teacher's salaries alone amount to as much as 83.5% of the total educational outlay. Figures calculated reveal that consumption expenditure (teacher's salaries, scholarships etc.) and investment expenditure (buildings, equipment, library books, laboratories etc.) have a discordant ratio. It was found that the percentage of 'consumption expenditure' to the total university expenditure increased from about 41 in 1947-48 to 52 in 1965-66. It further jumped to 64 in 1971-72, 73 in 1974-75 and 83.5 in 1998-99, after the revision of the grades of university teachers. Seen in real terms, the position is that idle children and idle adults who are eating and living at a level lower than the poverty line in most cases, have to be bunched together in order to bring them into the fold of education. It is, however, not they who finance education, for they obviously cannot, it is the state which has to do so. It has also been the time-honoured practice that higher the level of academic courses pursued, higher still is the public subsidy for the student trainee. Back to Top Judging from the scheme of social expenditure on education and training, a regular college student in a College of Arts or Science costs something like Rs. 401 per annum to the Government or the Management, without giving anything by way of return except that the gets a degree after completing a course and qualifying an examination. A correspondence student literally costs less than one-fourth to the Government or the Management. Since most of the institutions are run on a non-profit-no-loss basis (their surpluses are occasionally carried forward to the next year or become a source of general revenue for the University). There are normally no grants to meet deficit-on-account except where last years' surpluses are available. This position is, however, in for a welcome change in as much as many universities have now started meeting the on-account deficit of their correspondence course. A correspondence student, again, is not only not a liability on the state, but is a positive asset to the society. However, while the fact remains that correspondence course can finance their own programmes from the revenue resources of fees from the students and do not become a dead burden on the sponsoring universities, it should not create an impression that such courses should eventually become commercial concerns running at a profit and constitute a permanent revenue source for the general budget of the university. Any part of its resources should at no time be regarded as surplus and utilised for purposes of the university unconnected with the correspondence courses institute. The surplus money should be diverted for more and more of developments and charitable purposes like earmarking substantial amounts for grant of fee concession or total exemption of fee or for scholarships to deserving but financially crippled sections of students of which there is a large number. Correspondence distance education has come of age in India. However, no serious attempt has been made to evaluate the work and efficacy of the system in catering to the needs of thousands of students who cannot pursue a regular course of study. Institutes of Correspondence Education Centres of Distance Education have been working more or less as extension service agencies of universities which have created them. They not only teach the same courses of study but also use tools and skills which still retain their musky odour of the classroom system. Since the examinations for regular students and correspondence students are one and the same, the students have to be given examination-oriented study programmes to make them show an equal rating with regular students. This forces designers of lessons and other reading material to fall back upon the time-honoured and time-abused system of written notes which some-times border on the realm of cheap 'digests' available in market. In some cases, even the question-answer form is used to give the correspondence students readymade material for use in the examination. Evaluation of any educational programme which has successfully run for over a decade becomes one of the categorical imperatives of a system if the system has to look to the future needs of a changing situation. This applies to correspondence education as much as to the traditional modes of education. However, in the last decade U.G.C. committees on distance education on distance education have been able to review the working of only a few universities. Since no appreciable amount of data is available with the U.G.C. about the state of correspondence education in various universities (for the reason that the august body does not bother about a university unless funds are asked for a specific reason, and except for non-recurring investment expenditure, the universities do not hope to get anything for expansion of correspondence education), there has been no serious effort in evaluating the work of correspondence institutes. Occasional meetings and seminars or workshops organised by different universities have, however, given to the participants opportunities for exchanging views on various subjects. One thing that has emerged from this exchange of view and comparison of notes is the widespread belief that unless correspondence institutes are considered autonomous institutes, allowed to run their own courses to give their own degrees, they will continue to be looked down upon and considered 'poor relations' of their traditional counterparts. This is in spite of the fact that the system of degree linked jobs makes it imperative for a job-seeking individual to have the same degree either regular or though correspondence course of study. If an overhaul has to be done, it shall have to be done to the entire fabric of eduction. A built-in element of flexibility in course of study which can be given only through correspondence education is the need of the hour. Back to Top