Technology-Enabled Admission System in IGNOU: Issues and Challenges Gowthaman K.1,*, Sharma Oum Prakash2,** 1Deputy Director, Inter University Consortium, New Delhi, India 2Deputy Director, National Centre for Innovations in Distance Education, Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi, India (*Corresponding author) email id: *gowthaman@ignou.ac.in
**opsharma@ignou.ac.in
Abstract Information communication technology (ICT) plays a very important role in the field of education. Many universities have integrated ICT in their various activities including the process of admission. To facilitate the learners for an easy access and hassle-free admission at their own time, place and convenience, Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) has designed, developed and implemented an online admission system (OAS) during the year 2015. For identifying the problems and difficulties faced by the prospective learners while using this new system of online admission, a research study was taken up during October–December2016 period for January, 2017 admission session. As the problems and challenges faced by the learners were to be addressed simultaneously along with the admission process, it was decided to analyse the emails, telephone calls and face-to-face queries of the prospective students during this period. The aim of the present study was to critically review the IGNOU's OAS and to analyse the content of the emails to identify the issues and challenges of the OAS faced by various stakeholders including students, regional centres and student registration division and so on The selected emails from the prospective learners received during October–December, 2016 formed the sample of the study. Based on the qualitative analysis of the emails, the issues and challenges related to OAS have been identified and discussed in the present paper. Besides discussing the architecture of OAS, this paper also suggests the scope of further improvement in the existing OAS. As a result of this study, the possible areas of improvement like filling of application form, uploading documents, online payment and refund and so on have also been suggested in the paper. Top Keywords Technology-enabled admission, Online admission system, Learner support system, Issues and challenges, Digitalisation of student records, Data integration, Open and distant learning. Top |