Recently,
it happened to me to help my friend who was preparing for his degree exam,
which he pursued through distance education program of a popular university.
Since he was busy in preparing another paper, he asked me to read through the
fictions of his language paper and narrate him the outline of the story. This
was because, at a time, he could prepare both the papers. I accepted and was
shocked when I glanced through the outline of the story. Hardly, one could find
the correctly spelt words in the course material which the varsity had provided
the students.
Even the names of some popular
fictional characters were spelt in three different ways in three different
places. Had the original writer been here on the earth, he would have given up
writing fictions. Even, the popular phrases and proper nouns were mis-spelt. Candidates,
who could not pursue a course in regular, decide to do same through
correspondence courses. But, if the varsities make this kind of mistakes, would
candidates pursuing through correspondence, get enough knowledge as compared to
their regular counterparts.
Union HR Ministry is talking of
‘Global Competence’ of Indian education system. But in prior to that, the
ministry has to confirm this as well – an error free course content. My point
of argument is that there should be a quality audit in all universities for the
study materials. Even if, it does already exist, then where has it yielded
fruits? Will the universities teaching courses like marketing, product design
etc., prepare the errorless course material? Will the compilers of the course
material visualize their responsibility? Will UGC look into the matter?
“‘To err is human’, but to make
others follow the same error is inhumane”. I agree it is difficult to quality
audit the content, but do we need to compromise our standard of education? The
concerned varsities must scrutinize the course contents even for three or four
times, after all quality assurance matters a lot.
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