Case Study 2: Asia. The Indira Gandhi National Open University 

This case study is a transcript of an interview written by Desmond Keegan. 

The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) [42] (

http://www.ignou.edu

) in India 

offers two courses about Internet Awareness and about Web Design and Site Maintenance. 

The university has taken initiatives to launch its courses through the web. This will be 

accessible to all the students in remote areas. Many Multi Media Learning Centres have been 

established to provide services to the students. 

IGNOU is an open university with an enrolment of 300,000. 200,000 of these are enrolled in 

web based courses. 

The web is used for presentation, communication, administration, and teaching. The web 

provides an online learning environment including database and administration. IGNOU use 

WEBCT, but they had made very considerable development themselves before they bought 

WEBCT. Internet database construction is not their core business and they were not willing to 

proceed and to maintain what they had developed, so they chose WEBCT. They find it very 

economic and have now worked closely with WEBCT for over 12 months. 

Online materials must be given piecemeal to prevent students this age of racing ahead and 

around the materials. The design is kept simple but they start with the web and work back 

from there. This means they offer a consortium of online teaching from all content online to 

no content online. The decision depends on the nature of the content and whether they are 

developing from new or adapting an existing course to the web. They find that the Internet is a 

cheaper way to update course content, especially in subjects where they change content 

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