IGNOU to offer exams on mobile phones

Students those had enrolled in courses through distance education may soon be getting lesson capsules on their mobile phones and even taking exams using their handsets.

With the increase of mobile phones in distant parts of the country, the Indira Gandhi Nation Open University (Ignou) plans to use the technology for information and content delivery by 2009 and next an experimental multiple-choice exam in 2010, where students will be given a set time for answering a question before moving on to the next.

If the project succeeds through, India would become one of the first countries after South Korea to use the mobile phones for education.

V N Rajasekharan Pillai, vice chancellor, Ignou, in a conference said that considering the government’s target of 500 million telecom connections by 2010, the Indian domestic telecom outreach has grown to be the world’s second largest after China.”Mobiles will make education accessible to more people”.

The conference will see Ignou and Communication and Manufacturing Association of India (CMAI) come together to take open and distance learning to a new level.

Speaking about the long-term plans of the university in using telecom sector for education, Pillai said: “Mobile communication is effective. Unlike TV and other communication media, it is interactive and one can be connected to remote users. Our first aim is to use mobile technologies in dissemination of information and delivery of content to our students and the next is to introduce mobile examinations as an experiment.”

According to officials of Ignou, the university has given itself six months for creating mobile-compatible content.”Examinations over mobile will initially be a pilot project. But our aim is to tap this communication device to its optimum,” Pillai said.

At present SNDT University, uses mobile technology, N K Goyal, president of CMAI, narrated that “Mobiles are being used for information dissemination at present. The next stage is brief lectures on mobiles, followed by training. By 2009, the target is to have 25 million students and by 2010, it will extend to 50 million students using mobiles for education. But even that number would be just 10% of the total mobile users. So you can imagine the potential of mobile phones.”