SHILLONG: With the inauguration of its permanent building, the regional centre of Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) at NEHU here is making attempts to provide quality education to the people of the North East and live up to its expectations as ‘People’s University’.
IGNOU Vice-Chancellor Ravindra Kumar said on Wednesday that the North Eastern Council of IGNOU Regional Centre was constituted and the decision was taken in a meeting of directors of the nine regional centres in the North East.
“Regional directors will serve as convener of the Council by rotation. For the current year, A.S Guha, regional director, IGNOU, Regional Centre, Shillong, will be the convener till December 2017. The office of the Council will be set up in Shillong,” said Kumar.
V.V Reddy, Director Regional Services Division, IGNOU, New Delhi, said, “By 2018, we would like to create our presence in the North East. Hence as far as possible all regional centres must have their own building by 2018.”
Set with an aim to revamp IGNOU, Kumar said since Shillong is the first regional centre to build its own building, “we decided that requirements, nature, space of the building will be the responsibility of the North Eastern Council of IGNOU Regional Centre. They will forward their proposal to us and we will approve and grant them adequate money for construction of buildings”.
When asked whether it would train teachers in the primary level, Kumar said, “We are ready to participate with the State Government to train teachers because as per the Right to Education norms, every teacher must be a trained one. In the North East, more than 50,000 were trained by IGNOU.”
Kumar highlighted other two programmes of the University in which the Ministry of Human Resource and Development has given the permission to start Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) under Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds programme. All regional directors and assistant directors have been asked to develop at least one MOOC, which is as per the notification.
The other programme is the direct-to-home educational channels under the name Swayam Prabha. “IGNOU has been given responsibility for running four educational channels 24×7, four hours of live telecast with five sessions of four hours each as repeat telecast. Students can tune in to these channels at any time of the day. Anybody who gets DD programme will be able to watch,” Kumar said.
IGNOU is contemplating a six-month Hindi certificate course and it will provide uninterrupted internet facility to students in the North East.
