Role of Open Distance Learning in Higher Education: Needs, Strategies and Challenges

Abstract

Education is today considered to be the most effective instrument of Social Re-engineering and empowerment of people by imparting knowledge and skill and creating an informed citizen capable of setting agenda for good governance, great progress and harmonious socio-economic life. Education can alone reconstruct the world and the mankind. Education determines the level of prosperity, welfare and security of the people. Education in general and higher education in particular is the strongest instrument for the development and humanization of mankind. Expansion, access, equity of quality has become the concerns of higher education. Thus the changing social, economic, political and educational needs of the nation have made the administrators and policy framers to move away from conventional practices of education and have led to the emergence of Distance education all over the world.