By IANS,
New Delhi : The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) organised a workshop training teachers from varsities across the country in developing online courses.
“How to create/develop online courses” workshop was attended by 21 faculty members from various universities, including Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi, Anna University, Chennai, and Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth, Maharashtra.
“Open universities in the world and other traditional universities are developing online courses to enhance the reach of their study materials through videos, web content, internet and satellite,” an IGNOU official said.
“We understand that the teachers should be prepared to meet the challenges of the future and so the workshop was organised,” added the official.
The training included explaining and describing the instructional design for online courses, highlighting tools used to create such courses and so on.
“There should be judicious use of multimedia, activities and interactivity among learners for effective online learning,” said Madhu Parhar, director, inter-university consortium, IGNOU.
Uma Kanjilal, director of school of social sciences, IGNOU, elaborated upon information and communication technology initiatives at eGyanKosh – a national repository initiated with a mandate to store, index, preserve, distribute and share the digital learning resources.
“eGyanKosh has open access and has emerged as one of the world’s largest educational resource repositories,” said Kanjilal.
According to her, over 95 percent of IGNOU’s self-instructional print material has been digitised and uploaded on the repository; 1,600 video programmes on YouTube and virtual classes are initiatives by the varsity towards a flexible learning environment.
Meanwhile, the participants were all praise for the workshop and credited IGNOU for providing a detailed understanding.
“Being a technical person I know that we have to design a system from scratch but I am very thankful to IGNOU team for explaining everything in detail,” said Amit Agashe from Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth, Pune.
“It was a very nice learning experience,” he added.
The workshop provided hands-on training to the participants on creating a course, its category and assignments.
IGNOU, which started with two courses and 4,000 students in 1985, now offers around 450 programmes and has around three million students on its rolls.