Teachers in Open and Distance Education

Role and responsibilities of teachers in open and distance education as a knowledge workers:

When one compares the role and responsibilities of a teacher in the open and distance education, the situation is totally different from the face to face education. They work in a team; their excellence is recognized in a team as an individual teacher. They are performing multifaceted activities in the open and distance education. They design, develop, evolve appropriate programme/course delivery strategies, evolve evaluate strategies to assess the learners performance and system performance. The teacher not only design develop various courses and Programmes, they also main and revise the programme time to time. Above all the teacher working for Open University needs to have desirable traits to work in team.

The system of distance education demands both distance education systemic specialization and discipline expertise from the teacher. Systemic expertise evolves proper distance learning techniques to impart education at distance. To reach the knowledge to isolated self-learner and discipline expertise to streamline the knowledge’s in its curriculum self-directed learning designs. In this process, the system expect from a teacher multifaceted skills and commitments such as…

· The aimed knowledge design must be directly useful to social and cultural demands of the society. Here a teacher must be a cultural agent of the society. S/he may otherwise called ‘cultural teacher’

· The product must be suitable to increase and produce knowledge which should be suitable to market demands. Here teacher must be catalyst to produce market demands. S/he may otherwise called ‘Corporate teacher’ and

· To develop product or to deliver the product, s/he should have techno-managerial skills in the globalizing era. Awareness, skills, competency and command over operations of technology is must to work in open and distance education. It is present need and future demands of open and distance education. Skills over techno-managerial skills. The teacher s/he may otherwise called ‘techno-managerial s teacher’.

The individual teacher must be pro-active to make proper designs of the programme suitable to society and to the market, , the teacher, S/he must be process-active to translate the design in to development and evolve an appropriate delivery channels suitable depending on the Programmes and finally S/he must be post-active to evolve and undertake learner’s and systems evaluation strategies and finally, S/he must be always vigilant and re-active and responsible to public praise and criticism for the out put S/he produced for open and distance education. The final product of open and distance education is always under public scrutiny.

Hence, teacher working in the open and distance education are involved in complex activities. They must be possessed with varieties of skills, such as, socially sensitive and relevant to their body of knowledge, having market orientations to improve the products of the market and having techno-managerial skills to mange the knowledge.

In this process, with the heavy work load and expected targets, they are becoming more generalist, also appear that they are alienated from their peer group, gradually loosing on their subject specialization, they are more prone to generalist rather than specialist. Since the system of work differ, when one compares with the face-to-face system of education, finally while working under a team their excellence is not exposed, this individual teacher recognition is only possible in face-to-face education system. The individual teacher is un-acknowledged legislators of the knowledge in open and distance education. Ultimately the mind set of the teachers and policy makers make the meaningful design, develop, evolve an appropriate delivery and its evolution strategies.