Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Open University

From Researching Virtual Initiatives in Education

• This Programmes entry is a stub. You can help our projects by expanding it.

The Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Open University (BAOU) is a public institution of higher learning in Ahmedabad, Gujrat, India. It provides a variety of courses and degree programs through distance education and various flexible media (including e-learning) for its students, modeled on the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). The University offers 38 programmes, with an enrolment of more than 1,000,000 learners. This university is the first one in the state that offer three languages formula as a new pattern of studying.

Out of the 7 statutory Universities, 3 Universities have been running external degree courses for years. Of late, DTE (Directorate of Technical Education) has been offering distance learning diploma courses in civil, mechanical and electrical engineering. There are in the site different graphs, where we can see that the number of students has been increasing, in 2003 the number of students was 7.451 in 2007 it was 84.572, for this reason this university has to exploit this chance and invest more in distance learning, the culture of open distance learning exists in the state which augurs well for the BAOU. They also launched new programmes in 2003 when it began to increase the number of enrollements in 2003 they offered 17 programmes in 2007 66. They are going in the correct way because one of their objectives is:

To encourage the Open University and distance education system in the education pattern of the State.

The University has established Regional Centre on the campus of South Gujarat University, Rajkot and has initiated the process of another establishing Regional Centre on the campus of North Gujarat University, Patan. The University has more than 250 local study centers. It has jurisdiction over the whole state of Gujarat.

The tools for supporting e-larning are: Satellite to broadcast on the Tv,audio cassete, CD's and radio.

The Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Open University web site is at http://www.baou.org/

> India
> Programmes