1ISSUES IN COURSE DEVELOPMENT: THE EXPERIENCE AT THE INDIRA GANDHI NATIONAL OPEN UNIVERSITY IN INDIA

Within its brief existence of 12 years, IGNOU has attracted a mega-enrolment of over half a million students. To cater to this large heterogeneous corpus, it offers 45 programmes comprising 535 courses. Within developing countries, new institutions often adopt/adapt existing course materials from other relatively more established universities either within the country or abroad. However, IGNOU has so far resisted this option and has consistently built a large repository of course materials in print, audio and video. In fact it has assumed a leadership role in materials development for distance education within India, the Middle East and SAARC countries. The aim of this paper is to share the IGNOU experience and generate discussion on how to design and develop course materials within the parameters of relevance, innovation, flexibility, interactivity, the question of language. The final section will focus on quality assurance. But before we take up these issues, it might be appropriate to look at the different models of course development currently in operation at IGNOU: i) Programmes are initiated and planned by the internal faculty and most of the course materials written inhouse. The editing may be done by external experts or inhouse and the formatting as per house style and other coordination work is done by the core faculty. (Followed in the inception stages of the university) ii) The course material is written and edited entirely by external experts. The core faculty’s role then is limited to transforming the materials as per the norms for self-instructional materials, managing the printing and coordinating the audio-video production process. (Most popular at present) iii) A few programmes have been assigned on a project basis to specialist institutions. Internal faculty is responsible for ensuring that the self-instructional materials are adapted to fulfil institutional requirements (B.Tech programme and Banking