Session 19

Student Support Services in Open schooling: a study of students' need and satisfaction

Session Description:

Dr. Sushmita Mitra
Director (Student support services)
National Institute Of Open Schooling, India.

ABSTRACT:

It is believed that adequate student service creates the foundation for students' academic success. This is more so for Open and Distance Learning (ODL) System where the transaction of teaching and learning, managerial and organizational activities all revolve round the student, who is expected to be autonomous, independent, self-motivated and self-directed to undergo self learning at a distance in order to succeed on their studies. This is no different in the Open schooling System also where the students are mostly young distance learners vulnerable to drop out of the system if not supported in their learning experiences.

This consideration prompted the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) in India---- the largest Open school in the world------to integrate student support services into the system. However, there is little point in providing a student support service unless the quality of service is appropriate and valued by students (Simpson, 2002). Therefore it is important to identify what are more important to students and hence most likely to have an impact on their overall satisfaction. In this context this paper aims to identify the key factors that are important and contribute to the Open school students' satisfaction considering support elements at pre-entry phase, start up phase, learning phase, evaluation and certification phase and after certification phase. For this the importance-satisfaction model would be adapted to better recognize areas that are important to students as well as their degree of satisfaction with each attribute.

Presenter: Dr. Sushmita Mitra, Director (SSS), NIOS, India

Holds a Ph.D (Educational Technology) from IIT New Delhi, M. Tech (Applied Optics) from IIT, New Delhi, M.Sc (physics) from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India.

Had been associated for the last twenty seven years with the National Institute of Open Schooling, New Delhi (an autonomous organization under the Dept of Education, Govt. Of India) right from its inception, in different capacities. Currently holds the position of Director (Student Support Services) at NIOS, but for the last one year had been on leave to be in the United Kingdom.
Was on deputation to Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) for three years in a project titled Distance Education Programme (DEP) of District Primary Education Programme (DPEP), which was a collaborative project of IGNOU and National Council Educational Research and Training (NCERT), sponsored by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). In this the responsibilities lied in training various personnel of primary education under DPEP through distance education interventions in terms of methods and materials and activities were carried out in the states of Gujarat and West Bengal.

Following this was on deputation for two years to Indian Society for Technical Education, New Delhi in a Swiss Development Agency’s Project for development of Technical Learning materials in Computer science and Engineering and Electronics and Electrical Engineering. Developed a number of materials and trained authors who are teachers of technical institutions.

International experiences have been as follows:

• Worked as Resource Person for Commonwealth of Learning (COL), Vancouver, Canada, for the Forum for Secondary school education for Sub Sahara African countries held in Botswana.
• Was appointed as an Expert by Commonwealth of Learning (COL) for finalizing a project proposal for Junior Open School in Bangladesh under Bangladesh Open University, Dhaka.
• Appointed as Consultant by COL to train Tutors of Learning Centers in Bangladesh.
• Research residency programme with International Research Foundation in Open Learning, Cambridge, UK
• Underwent UNESCO sponsored Study visit to Australia
• Underwent COL sponsored Study visit to University Sains Malaysia, Penang,
• Participation in the 2nd PAN COL conference held in South Africa in 2002.
• Participated and chaired sessions in the 4th PAN COL CONFERENCE held in Jamaica in November 2006.
• Appointed as a Consultant to Develop and Finalized a “Training Manual for the Tutors” for Bangladesh.
• Visits to UK, USA, Europe and other South East Asia countries at personal level

At national level too acted as Resource person on many occasions.

There are a number of papers and publications on areas of ODL in my credit.

Languages known are English, Bengali, and Hindi (working knowledge).