INTRODUCTION
In the new developing economies interest in distance education and in particular, in online distance education, is increasing. (Daniels, J, West P. 2006). In India, this trend is evident in the proliferation of foreign and domestic institutions, public and private, becoming the new “providers” of online digitally delivered education. This proliferation should not be surprising given that India is a country rushing to develop educated human resources to meet the needs of a rapidly growing economy in every sector. Broad access to high quality education is a high priority to meet the needs of a knowledge-driven society.
A World Bank report (2005), “India and the Knowledge Economy: Leveraging Strengths and Opportunities,’” points out that India is beginning to have a significant global impact on science, engineering, information technology (IT), and research and development (R&D through its many highly educated and vocationally qualified people. However, as the report also highlights, to create a sustained cadre of knowledge workers, “India needs to make its education system more demand-driven to meet the emerging needs of the economy and raise the quality of all higher education institutions, not just a few world-class ones, such as the Indian Institutes of Technology”. Equally important, as many of India’s leaders have pointed out, the larger goal to pursue is that of global leadership through a world-class knowledge enterprise.
About 10% of the relevant age group in India is currently enrolled in higher education, whereas in developed countries corresponding figures are around 30% to 50% of the relevant population. The engineering education sector, alone is well illustrative of the unmet demand that can be fulfilled by online and distance education in India. Even to maintain the current levels a new major university will be needed every week
The transformation of India into a knowledge society is going to depend, to a large extent, on the capacity to provide such knowledge citizens and knowledge workers. Yet, the needs for continuous education that are essential for skill upgrading and for equipping people to be not just better as workers but also as citizens are largely unmet.
In December 2005, India’s National Knowledge Commission (NKC)1 decided to explore opportunities in the areas of e-learning and distance education, in order to understand the implications for extending access and enhancing quality for higher education in India. Several discussions were held with a diverse group of stakeholders comprising key initiatives, institutions and individuals representing government, industry, academia and civil society, in India and elsewhere. This chapter draws upon the recommendations of the commission to “describe a strategy for addressing the escalating needs for quality education in the Indian context that leverages open educational resources.” The approaches described for the adoption and diffusion of open educational resources should be extensible to other contexts.
BACKGROUND
A key goal for open and distance education is to extend higher education to non-traditional learners, specifically those who are at a disadvantage in the conventional system with respect to age, gender, geography, social and economic background. Adopting an open, flexible and relatively inexpensive approach is one strategy for meeting this goal. In many cases this type of open and flexible program could be the only university or higher education that some people may get. However the current formal system simply does not have the physical infrastructure or the human resources to meet this demand vector in terms of scale or quality.
In India, several initiatives, notably the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) and EDUSA have been launched in recent years, but their impact is stymied due to many factors. These factors include a dearth of quality educational content and applications, lack of a robust infrastructure for delivery, a lack of appropriate organizational arrangements as well as inadequate educational tools and practices.
Distance education is also largely perceived as second-class education, for school leavers alone but not for mainstream education. Distance education is seen essentially seen as a delivery mode and not a whole educational process/platform. Consequently many of the inadequacies of traditional educational practices — rote dependency, no interactivity, lack of experiential learning opportunities — are merely carried over to this mode of delivery.
Overall the potential for distance education, particularly online learning, is under realized.
OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
A useful description of Open Educational Resources (OER) from the Hewlett Foundation website is as follows: OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. OERs include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.
The increasing capabilities of the Internet coupled with Open Educational Resources offer unprecedented opportunity to significantly widen access to quality educational resources for different sectors. Open educational resources present the potential to bring globally created educational resources to serve the knowledge needs of diverse communities; they offer the possibility of bringing interactive educational experiences to learners that have hitherto not been the norm.
As the NKC Report articulates, “ Our success in the knowledge economy hinges to a large extent on upgrading the quality of, and enhancing the access to, education. One of the most effective ways of achieving this would be to stimulate the development and dissemination of quality Open Access (OA) materials and Open Educational Resources (OER) through broadband Internet connectivity.” As a part of the NKC consultative process, a working group of experts, including distinguished members from academia, government, private sector and users was constituted to suggest necessary measures that would facilitate access and quality improvement in Higher Education through Open Educational Resources.
This group generated the series of steps outlined below. Theses steps are viewed as elements of a systemic approach to deliver quality and increase access through contemporary online distance education that leverages network enabled open educational resources.
1. Launch a national e-content and curriculum initiative.
This e-content and curriculum initiative will focus on rapid production and acquisition of content with initial focus on technical education, science and technology, medicine, including public health. This initiative would include the following four strategies:
A. India leverages the global open educational resources movement to take advantage of content initiatives. Sustainable development of relevant, quality content is a difficult and expensive proposition, given the diverse needs of various sectors in a growing knowledge economy. Ensuring quality is a challenge in itself. Emerging international and national open content initiatives such as the global Open Course Ware Consortium, MIT’s Open Courseware (OCW), MERLOT, CURRIKI from the Global Educational Learning Community initiative and India’s National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning NPTEL are offering quality educational content as open resources. India can leverage these materials, as they are readily available for adoption and adaptation and as models for further indigenous content production.
It is notable that the NKC has recommended that at a policy level, all research articles published by Indian authors receiving substantial government or public funding must be made available under Open Access (OA) and that as a next step, a national academic OA portal should be developed, with the government allocating resources to increase the current digitization efforts of books and periodicals, which are outside copyright protection.
B. Support the production of quality content by a select set of Indian institutions. Select a set of key institutions representing diverse knowledge areas like Engineering, Medicine, Arts, Humanities, Science etc. to develop standards-based customizable quality content and make it available not only for India but also for global consumption. Building internet-based, multimedia, and open content repositories for various science and engineering subjects should be given high priority for development.
Initiate development of online simulation programs for science and engineering labs, as well as for real time manipulation. The iLab model, which provides worldwide access via the internet to laboratories at MIT and elsewhere, is a model to employ directly, and emulate for providing widespread access to unique and expensive labs. These “real” virtual labs should be facilitated and complemented by situated labs affiliated with leading universities, offering practical training and workshops. These labs would serve the needs of students who are in distance education programs and for continuous life long learning for improving professional skills from industries.
D. Undertake a large-scale e-Curriculum development effort directed toward adaptation and adoption support: This pedagogical resource development effort would include:
I. Training and support for the development and acquisition of relevant, quality content to meet the educational needs of diverse sectors and disciplines.
II. Adoption support for content delivery through training of teachers.
III. Identifying centers preferably in current institutions so that the faculty in those institutions will eventually own and modify the repositories to suit the levels of students of their classes
IV. Embracing standards for content development and maintenance.
V. An assessment process to ensure quality applications and tools to access, view and navigate across concepts, courses and curricula.
Leveraging global alliances like the OCW Consortium would be valuable to this process.
2. Strengthen and Renew Infrastructure for Open and Distance Education
The delivery infrastructure for distance education in India has advanced considerably in recent years from its modest beginnings when, like the British Open University, it relied largely on print and the postal system.
Facilities for audio-video conferencing, and broadcast via TV/radio have proliferated along with the remarkable growth of mobile telephony and broadband connectivity. The establishment of EDUSAT is noteworthy in this regard. However, despite these advancements, the infrastructure readiness to support open and distance education for the scale and quality of educational access and delivery that is desired needs considerable attention. Lack of sustained connectivity, the absence of inter-institutional linkages as well as the need and difficulty of interoperability, presents challenges. The infrastructure development must address a variety of needs beyond connectivity for access, such as, communication and interactivity with the learner, development and delivery of customized materials as well as learning experiences, interoperable applications, evaluation, governance and sustainability. With these considerations in mind the following dimensions are seen as being crucial to support a network-enabled open and distance education model:
1. Access: Robust and ubiquitous connectivity for individuals and institutions: All the recommendations that have been made in terms of developing infrastructure and programs are contingent on excellent connectivity. A national backbone that provides high bandwidth connections and advanced networking capabilities is critical for reliable access and quality. Connectivity with global networks like Internet2 in the US is also essential for the kind of collaboration and sharing that is recommended as an important element of the educational strategy It is important to recognize that while the Internet and high performance networks are largely seen as relevant only in the context of advanced research, they are critical infrastructure for educational quality and access. The government’s lead in developing this infrastructure complemented by partnerships in the private sector to provide local and institutional infrastructure will be an important determinant of progress.
2. Delivery: Ensuring that the quality educational content is available in a reliable manner and available for appropriate use will require a delivery ecosystem comprising of the following:
• Distributed repositories of educational resources for managing acquisition, upgrading and preservation of the educational content.
• Educational applications such as Learning Management Systems as well as tools for quizzing, authoring and collaboration tools to be used for a range of courses and programs
• Open, standards-based Service-Oriented Architecture that facilitates the interaction of diverse applications with a variety of educational resources enables localization and contextualization of resources and allows integration of academic systems (repositories, digital libraries, etc.) with administrative systems such as those for student information and human resources.2 With an ever increasing base of online learning content and service providers, increasing attention is being paid to achieving integration and interoperability among disparate applications, content and infrastructure services so that the world of digital learning resources becomes less chaotic, and many excellent materials do not remain underutilized.
• Facilities for interactions: Virtual interaction spaces that bring experts in contact with learners as well as centers for facilitating contact and direct learner support as appropriate are important. The installed base of distributed training facilities established for IT training over the past several years might present an important opportunity for being leveraged.
3. Organizational Enablement (Support and Governance): While strengthening the technical substrate of the infrastructure for extensive access, production and delivery of appropriate resources and programs is necessary, it is by no means sufficient for realizing sustainable impact through open and distance education. The history of educational innovation diffusion is rife with examples of unsuccessful efforts that paid insufficient attention to organizational considerations related to the introduction and adoption. In fact, the underutilization of the existing infrastructure capabilities for education can be attributed to the lack of appropriate organizational arrangements leading to problems of coordination, utilization and quality. For instance, currently, even the available electronic media stands underutilized for purposes of instruction, assignments, examination and governance.
Organizational efforts have to be directed towards
• Technical coordination including, promoting and monitoring interoperability, specifications and standards in light of an ever increasing base of online learning content and service providers and the increasing attention that needs to be paid to achieving integration and interoperability among disparate applications, content and infrastructure services.
• Providing scaffolding and support for enabling use of shared resources, curriculum integration as well as to provide guidelines for the development and exchange of resources for sustainable impact.
• Governance to promote alignment and cooperation: The successful end-end production and delivery of educational resources and experience will require multiple actors/ agencies – public and private to cooperate. A policy Framework to ensure integration and synergy without sacrificing quality, access or efficiency must be in place.
The recommendations articulated below have been developed to address these “organizational” considerations:
4. Establish an autonomous organization to monitor, and support the implementation, adoption and sustainability of the networked based open education model. The activity and approach recommended here involve multiple areas (IT, Education, Research, Innovation Planning). It is imperative that this meta-organization, while having linkages to existing educational and IT organizations, remain independent so that the concerns and priorities of no one organization do not dominate the open education agenda. This organization will provide leadership and coordination for network -based open education by undertaking the following activities:
• Select institutional collaborations for developing content.
• Develop adoption support strategy institutions.
• Recommend and monitor standards for content development and adoption.
• Advise on policy implications vis-a-vis licensing, IPR, etc.
• Identify and set benchmarks based on global best practices.
• Establish relationships with global initiatives.
• Implement change management in educational institutions and government agencies involved in the pilot.
5. Implement a national scale faculty and institutional development plan for distance education in existing and new universities. The goals of this program would be three-fold:
• Promote distance and network based delivery techniques amongst university faculty.
• Modernizing current “correspondence course” programs for quality and access.
• Develop domain competencies and teaching skills for quality education using quality faculty and high quality materials.
• Integrate DE into University curriculum and organizational structure.
6. Actively seek and incentivize public-private partnerships in developing and delivering open source and standards based distance and distributed education solutions.
The desirable functional characteristics of the educational environment that we want to keep squarely in focus as we develop the of the infrastructure for ODE are:
• Flexibility: Education is not just about transmitting content to students over the Internet or other delivery channels. it is about allowing learners to structure the reality of their educational experiences in ways that best fit their needs and abilities. Network delivered education using open resources also enable educational opportunity that is not constrained by location or time.
• Interactivity: Interaction is essential for quality education. It is important to increase the possibilities of interaction by creating learning environments, virtual or physical, where learners and teachers can interact amongst themselves and with each other.
• Proximity: Proximity is increased between content and learners, teachers and students, students and other students, and also between research and teaching. Initiatives like i-labs use virtual environments to bring research, hands-on experience and teaching together for a quality educational experience.
• Adaptability: Digitally stored and easily accessible content can be prepared for a variety of sectors, with a common infrastructure delivering quality in each one. These can include formal and non-formal education, vocational education and continuous education in diverse areas such as Agriculture, Health Sciences, Arts & Humanities, Social Sciences, Engineering, Sciences, and Languages, The ODE environment must provide a flexible workflow and process model that can be fine-tuned and configured to support different learning modalities, both structured as well as unstructured.
• Sustainability: Educational practices must be developed so as not to be tightly bound to specific ethnology implementations or organizational arrangements Technical as well as policy frameworks must ensure that educational applications and practices can preserve their viability in the face of a rapidly changing technology landscape and possible organizational shifts. An important consideration for sustainability is the ability to support choice. The technical infrastructure must enable localization of curriculum and innovation in practice.
The long-term goals of these infrastructure efforts are to link the Indian educational community worldwide, and to provide easy access to the full range of intellectual life and resources (library materials, research facilities, colloquia, etc.) and make it easy to communicate, follow coursework, and collaborate online. The infrastructure must enable people to find content easily wherever it might be on the Internet, and incorporate it into their courses; learners should be able to move between institutions taking their learning records with them. Teachers and learners must receive decision-making support from administrative systems. In fact, achieving these goals are key to the realization of life long learning and a global education marketplace.
FUTURE TRENDS
Realizing the vision embodied in this framework and these recommendations will require a systemic approach that addresses technology, organizational and policy considerations. Accordingly a set of proximal implementation activities have been proposed to implement and monitor the recommendations for advancing open and distance education urgently and efficiently. These activities include the establishment of an autonomous national service directed toward meeting the scaled up demand for educational assessment and testing as well as credit banks and portfolios services for accumulating and managing credits acquired by learners as make use of the opportunities presented by this distributed, cross-institutional model of extended educational opportunity.
A significant early step that is proposed is the establish a national repository of Open Educational Resources under a National Education Foundation set up and funded for this purpose. The repository would be developed through a collaborative exercise pooling in the effort and expertise of all institutions, under a National Education Foundation set up and funded for this purpose, The National Education Foundation would be a new, autonomous institution with the necessary mandate to serve the following:
• Provide leadership and coordination of network-based open education resources
• Select institutional collaborations for developing content
• Develop adoption support strategies
• Recommend and monitor standards for content development and adoption
• Advise on policy implications vis-a-vis licensing, intellectual property rights, etc.
• Identify and set benchmarks based on global best practices
• Establish relationships with global OA and OER initiatives
Looking further ahead a confluence of local and global trends can have tremendous potential in sub-stantively impacting the educational landscape in the Indian context. Of particular significance are the following indicators:
• The large and rapidly growing mobile communication infrastructure of broadband wireless networks and cell phones in India. Broadband phones could go beyond providing access to traditional educational resources to enabling more interactive educational approaches?
• The growing global influence of “collectivity” characterized by the Web 2.0 movement’s social networks and enabled by movements such as Creative Commons Open Education consortia, which point to transformational opportunities for distributed education. Again these aspects of the evolving open education ecosystem emphasize a focus not just on extensive information access, but also on scaling rich, interactive social learning experiences.
CONCLUSION
It is clear that in order to build excellence in the educational system and increase India’s competitive advantage in fields of knowledge, open and distance education efforts need to move beyond their current peripheral role and become central to the delivery of quality educational opportunities. These efforts need to embrace contemporary practices in e-learning involving network-enabled open education.
The key messages in these recommendations were incorporated in the overall set of extensive recommendations made by the working group of the NKC on Open and Distance Education. (ODE). The recommendations that are proposed here focusing on leveraging Open Education Resources are expected to pave the way for creating a system that meets the emerging demands of the market, while simultaneously providing an opportunity for quality education to everyone. Overall they hold promise for profound transformations in the economics and ecology of education in India.
KEY TERMS
IGNOU: The Indira Gandhi National Open University was established in 1985 by an act of Parliament (IGNOU Act, 1985) as the first national university to impart open and distance education and also the nodal agency to coordinate, encourage and set standards for the same. Its degrees are recognized to be at par with other universities by the UGC (as of 1992). In addition, IGNOU also allocates and disburses funds for open universities and distance education systems in India through the Distance Education Council (DEC).
EDUSAT: The first exclusive satellite for serving the educational sector in India. Edusat is a collaborative project ofIndian Space Research Organization (ISRO,) the Union ministry of human resource development, state departments of education and the Indira Gandhi National Open University in response to the growing demand for an interactive satellite based distance education system The satellite has multiple regional beams covering different parts of India — five Ku-band transponders with spot beams covering northern, north-eastern, eastern, southern and western regions of the country, a Ku-band transponder with its footprint covering the Indian mainland region and six C-band transponders with their footprints covering the entire country.
OCW Consortium: The Open Courseware Consortium is a collaboration of more than 150 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance education and empower people worldwide through Opencourseware.
MIT OCW: MIT OpenCourseware (OCW)) OCW is a free publication of course materials from all of MIT’ s courses on the Web. Since the project’s launch OCW has published free lecture notes, exams, and other resources from more than 1800 courses spanning MIT’s entire curriculum.
NPTEL: The National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL), a Joint Venture by seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and funded by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Government of India to enhance the quality of engineering education in the country by developing curriculum based video and web courses. In the first phase of this a collaborative project, supplementary content for 129 web courses in engineering/science and humanities have been developed. Each course contains materials that can be covered in depth in 40 or more lecture hours. In addition, 110 courses have been developed in video format, with each course comprising of approximately 40 or more one-hour lectures. In the next phase other premier institutions are also likely to participate in content creation. Presently, there are 14 open universities and about 130 distance education institutions (DEIs) of conventional universities in operation. There is perceived confusion, unevenness and disparities in the structure and quality of programs from these institutions.
Sam Pitroda, aims to promote the creation and application of knowledge to meet the needs of various sectors and advancing access and quality for transforming India’s educational enterprise. http://pib.nic.in/release/release.asp?relid=9576. This paper is based on work undertaken by the author who served as an honorary advisor to India’s National Knowledge Commission (NKC). The engagement was partially supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
The considerations regarding open source software and open standards based architecture indicated in these recommendations intersect with the recommendations for e-governance. We recommend the adoption of open standards based efforts and open source software wherever possible for deploying cost-effective and sustainable solutions.
