AIOU nears enrolment target of 1m students
Islamabad: Distant education has proved its worth in the country, which is evident by the fact that Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU) is going to make one million enrolments shortly.
This was stated by AIOU VC Prof Dr Mahmood H Butt in an exclusive interview. AIOU, a member of a limited network of universities offering distant education, would start four-year graduation programme next year to meet international standards, he said.
The programme had been designed according to recommendations of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) and initially students would be enrolled in the disciplines of chemistry, microbiology and education.
Dr Butt said 30 percent of total teachers in the country were once students of the AIOU in one way or the other. He regretted that around 70 percent of the teachers in the country were undergraduates.
He said only less than four percent of the total students could reach the higher level of education, which was much lower than the international standards. He was of the view that in order to earn a respectable ranking in the world, there was a need to lift this percentage up to 10 percent in the next 10 years.
To drive his point home, he put a comparison of Pakistan with South Korea, where more than 45 percent students went to universities.
He expressed concern over less than 60 percent enrolment of children in schools with a 30 percent dropout rate in the first three years of education saying another 20 percent left school before completing primary education.
"The country is allocating 2.5 percent of the GDP in education sector, which should be enhanced to nine percent in the next ten years," he recommended. "If we want to achieve millennium development goals (MDGs), we should at least double the allocation for primary education sector within a couple of years," he said. The AIOU vice chancellor said the mode of prevailing distance learning system had changed and recommended technology-driven distance learning to replace the system. "Easy access to computer for students at reasonable price, subsidised connectivity and no-taxes on computers for education is a must to achieve desired results," he said.
He dispelled the impression that AIOU degrees had less worth, saying it was only a perception and not a reality. "We have adopted a strict criteria for tutors and only those with Master's degree in relevant field and five-year experience are registered as tutors with the AIOU," he said.
He said before enrolling students for MPhil and PhD programmes, the university set a high merit and students with at least 60 percent marks could take admissions, having passed GRE.
"Moreover, the university does not start any programme unless it has at least three PhD teachers for it," he said.
About financial crunch in higher education sector, Dr Butt said it did not affect much as the AIOU got only 11 percent of its recurring grant from the HEC while it met the rest of its expenditure by its own resources. However, the government's decision to hold up the HEC grants had badly affected development projects in the education sector as a whole, he said.
He said it was astonishing that the HEC budget was even less than any one university in Singapore. "Allocations in educations sector is investment in future of the nation," he said. Daily Times
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