Distance Education or distant education?

Distance Education is big business in our country. We now have a plethora of Universities offering a huge variety of courses in virtually every subject under the sun.

However, just peel the outer surface, and onc just would see a huge amount of bad administration, lessons never being sent to students on time, callous staff in the so-called study centres who offer the worst of service, exhorbitant fees and so on.

Nowhere is the Distance education craze so rampant as it is in Tamil Nadu. The Madras University, the Madurai Kamaraj University, the Annamalai University, the Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Alagappa University,Bharadidasan and Bharathiar Universities, and the even not-so-old Periyar University headquartered in Salem,offer courses in arts, science, and even the MBA degree. Many of these Universities do not even conduct an entrance examination to evaluate the standard of students who get admitted to the prestigious MBA course.

Distance education simply dilutes the standard of any degree. The emphasis is always on "somehow" passing the examination, and quality suffers at every stage. It is rather strange that thousands of students should enroll into courses that are otherwise even available on a part-time basis.

The height of nonsense is now evident in the starting of the Master's Degree in Social Work (MSW), by one of the oldest Universities in Tamil Nadu. Those who are even a litte familiar with the various subjects that are taught in the full time MSW course in prestigious Schools of Social Work like the one in Loyola College, Chennai, the Madras School of Social Work, the Indore School of Social Work or the Baroda School of Social Work,will readily agree that it is almost impossible to teach subjects like Social Case Work, and Social Group Work, through the distance education mode. Moreover, these two methods of professional social work, require two days of intensive intership, every week, during the first year, in institutions that offer the student ample opportunities to examine the theoritical concepts in a practical setting. In fact, several schools of Social Work, have tie-up arrangements with institutions for this purpose.

One wonders what the Association of Schools of Social Work, which is the apex body of Social Work professionals monitoring standards of higher education in Social Work, has to say about the recently started MSW Degree through the Distance Education mode.

Similarly, the MBA degree holders, who are mostly employed in some jobs as junior or middle management executives never ever get recognition for the additional degree or knowledge that comes along with it. Not without reason though. The distance education MBA is most distant when it comes to offering any food for thought, is never ever rooted in at least Indian case-studies, and is absolutely nowhere what is taught in the IIMs or even in the Tier two B-schools in India. The practising executive who gets to attend some lectures in the study centres finds to his shock that whatever theory was taught, has absolutely no relation to real-world situations. Neither has he acquired even one per cent analytical skills or the decision making skills that are part of the staple diet of the full time MBA.

Is Distance Education, Distant Education? Iam afraid so. Iam yet to come across any meaningful debate on the dubious quality of various courses taught through distance education. It positively makes a huge number of administrative staff of the Universities very rich and assured of life-time employment, but nothing more to the student community. It is high time, some adminstrative mechanism is instituted by the University Grants Commission to regulate the quality of Distance Education courses.

The sooner this is done, the better.

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