University of Madras is one of the oldest universities in India and it was established in the year 1857. Mr. P. Duraiswamy is the current vice-chancellor of this prestigious university. This University has been offering superb distance education and by these distant education courses this university gets huge amounts of money. The news that has emerged now is in this current academic year there would be temporary closures of many distant education courses. This could be due to the directive issued by UGC or University Grants Commission.
It is known that IDE or Institute of Distance Education offers as many as 97 undergraduate, postgraduate and certification courses. Every year 25000 to 30000 students enrol in these courses offered by University of Madras through distance education. It is clear that 7 % of the university of Madras total revenue is got through distance education and that amount is Rs 13 crores to Rs 15 crores.
According to the professors, admissions are conducted in 2 cycles every year in the academic and calendar year formats. The examinations play an important role and it ensures that the IDE gets a regular flow of money throughout the year. The sensational piece of news is UGC has accorded recognition to run only courses like BA (public administration), MA (public administration) and MA (political science). It is now expected that the letter from UGC would arrive in the next week and this letter would be pinpointing the shortcomings of distance education courses offered by university of Madras. The university would try to rectify these shortcomings in a month of time according to the guidelines of UGC.
Vice-chancellor of university of Madras, Mr. Duraiswamy later expressed his views. He spoke about how at the IDE block at the university at Chepauk campus there are so many enquiries from the students regarding the distant education courses. He then spoke about how the enrolment for the current academic year 2018-19 has been put on hold and would begin once this issue gets resolved. The vice-chancellor later spoke about how the course material was of high quality and there would not be concern regarding that. The 3 above mentioned courses that were given recognition by the UGC were different from the rest because these three courses had atleast 2 dedicated teachers whereas the other courses had wither one dedicated teacher or no dedicated teacher. The professors from the regular stream doubled up for the IDE courses.
Institute of Distance Education or IDE doesn’t have a full time director and the above mentioned issues have arisen at this point of time. The sources have confirmed that the university has not been able to find a suitable candidate to take care of the important departments despite issuing couple of advertisements for the post of the director.
The vice-chancellor of the University of Madras explained how this issue could be resolved by shuffling few professors from the regular courses to IDE courses inside a month. By this recognition for other courses could be got. It is known that 50 % of the yearly enrolment is got through both MBA and MCA courses and derecognition of these courses is also an issue. This was also confirmed by the vice-chancellor. It is important to mention that the UGC had directed the universities to get recognition from All India Council for Technical E Education or AICTE and there are no AICTE guidelines for Open and Distant Learning