OPEN LEARNING: TRENDS, QUALITY AND CHALLENGES IN THE GLOBAL CONTEXT

India is a land of great diversity with students coming from different socio-economic backgrounds. Open and distance learning is one of the most rapidly mounting fields of education, and its prospective impact on all education delivery systems has been greatly accentuated through new developments in information and communication technologies. It is a new paradigm that opens up opportunities for sharing ideas, collaborating between people locally and in varied locations, and facilitating more meaningful engagement in learning. Open and distance learning has existed for about one hundred years in the more developed regions and for one or two generations in the developing regions. Major changes have occurred in the world economy, in particular with regard to the information-bearing technologies. These demand the attention of governments for education and for human resource development. One of the technological trends is the emergence of new forms of distance learning based on more interactive telecommunication technologies, with pedagogical, economic and organizational implications. Hence this paper intends to appraise the concept, history, trends, quality and the challenges of open and distance learning in the global context.