The opportunities and challenges of ICT in open and distance learning system with special reference to West Bengal

In a huge country like India Open and Distance Learning system of education emerges to provide quality education to a large number of learners. ODL is an area to address the fundamental issues of access, equity and quality of higher education to improve human capabilities and to achieve the vision of knowledge economy. ICT is playing an important role in ODL which was difficult to perform for the traditional system for its limited resources. Innovative use of ICT has completely revolutionized the conventional ODL system by reducing the cost and time of imparting education and introducing need based educational programmes to a large number of learners. In distance learning as students are remote to the institution, web based learning and student support services are required at different phases of student learning cycle and also for knowledge and information sharing as done in conventional system. In this paper the tremendous potentialities of ICT to serve all the purposes are discussed. However, there are some challenges and issues on its application in ODL set up which are also addressed.