QUALITY ASSURANCE IN OPEN, DISTANCE AND E-LEARNING

by G. Dhanarajan[1]

Full of his Article can be downloaded here: dhanarajan 

In 1999, Peter Drucker predicted that in the next 50 years, “schools and universities will change more rastically than they have since they assumed their present form 300 years ago when they organized hemselves around the printed book”.[1] Drucker was not alone in his pronouncements. There are others as well. Some twenty years ago Gardner the then Secretary of Education of the US under President Lyndon Johnson, futurologist and Stanford Professor of Education said “I am entirely certain that 20 years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive”[2]. He seemed to have had in mind an education universe that would be driven by intelligent technologies and education systems transformed to use all of the potential of such technologies.

The Technology universe imagined in 1989 has certainly come to pass and will continue to move higher and higher in value in the food chain.  Education systems, however, sadly have so far been slow to utilize the new assets at their disposal. Even as recent as ten years ago the choice of technologies for purposes of delivering education was somewhat limited, partly because they were expensive, analogue stand-alone appliances with limited versatility; requiring many skilled technicians to create and deliver the product. Radio and television are prime examples of the demand that these technologies made on educational systems. Those that did not fall into this category such as overhead projectors, slide projectors, etc., consequently, had limited reach.

The picture now is completely different. Limitation to technology application in education is no longer the versatility, convenience, cost and potential of the technology but rather the limitation of our imagination in the way they can be applied. Through integration, convergence, miniaturization and intelligence the technologies have become friendly. The question is no longer whether technologies are useful in the teaching and learning environment but which technologies are best suited for a particular purpose. But as is so often the case, “Universities [which] are often at the leading edge in the use of technologies for research … have been much slower to develop [and use] technology within the teaching function in their [own]working environment] the very institutions that give birth to these technologies are often the very last to use them”.[1]

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