 to this station on learning for development. We have with us Professor Ram Thakralade in this studio who is an evident personality in the field of open and distance learning. He was the vice chancellor of three universities, out of that two universities are open universities and that two mega open universities. His vision has brought both these universities ahead of our time. We have Professor Thakralade here. Namaskar sir. Namaskar. Welcome to this session on learning for development. What according to you are the major challenges for the development today? Major challenge which we are facing today is of transition from industrial society to the post industrial society and this transition is always technological based when it comes to age transition and age changes, technology changes, social organization changes and all systems, old systems get replaced by completely new systems. When such a age transition takes place, entire radical reconstruction and change takes place, will our education, the same type of education of 19th and 20th century help in educating our young generation for the futures? Now young generation has to create futures. They can't copy future. This is one of the aspect and one scenario one has to keep in mind. Second part is so far we were considering isolated campuses, classrooms, personal education and all that was there. Education is always personal as well as social. But then that was a separate campus based education or at the most distance education based on the same form and for trends of structure. But when you come down to the new education in a connected society whose intimacy is increasing day by day, so when such intimate relationship is getting established among the people, among the societies, among the communities globally as well as locally, then will that education system survive or we need something different? In fact, if there is a radically different future then education needs to be radically reconstructed and a new education system has to be evolved. I think this is the major challenge. The second challenge is our knowledge centric or learning centric education. We ask them to learn content and knowledge and once they know it, the knowledge and the skills, their problem is well we rather give them certification. But we do not create capability of the students in order to apply that capacity to solve the problems. What according to you is the process of learning which would contribute to this development? I think the learning process which we have developed in students through instructional design, content based learning and all that are the tools and techniques is very inadequate for the new age. Inadequate in the sense that if you look at the four pillars of education UNESCO identified, it is learning to know that means knowledge, learning to do skill development, learning to work together and working together is co-creating, coming together and create some sort of development, values one has to create through such work and fourth one is learning to be how I transform myself, how I transform my society. So the formation, reformation, transformation or rebuilding of the new society is a process in which everybody has to participate. If you are not going to that extent your education or our education is completely inadequate and therefore education has to be for the futures, future creating education and futures, how many futures are there? For every child there is a different future, for every student there is a different future. Now how can we create an education system which is not linear, which is not conformist, which is not bunching and creating classes among them but allowing their innate talents to grow through learning and applying processes and bring them to a highest level of personal and talent achievement. I mean that is the type of education we have to create it and not the conventional type of education. Do you think that again, audio processes and distant learning processes will be more important? They will be because you want to just now every learner is having and will have more and more access to all global knowledge at the click of the computer button. Now if that all knowledge is available why one should memorize knowledge? Why one should understand everything? Instead one should apply that knowledge to the problems I am facing in life and working. Now if suppose I identify problems in my locality in my situation which I can tackle then my education will be useful for solving problems and achieving development, personal development as well as self-development, personality development, self-development as well as social development, locality development. If I rather consider global knowledge and apply it to the situated development situation whatever I choose and I am well will be the situation and I have to solve the problems of that. So global knowledge used for social or local development is the approach our education system should have and now here you will find open and distance education. You want all sorts of knowledge. Your single college or even single university will not be able to give everything. So you have to have an open and distance education as a basis for that and an open and distance education system must give you all the global resources and therefore open educational resources becomes a great tool, great tool of democratizing creativity, democratizing knowledge and democratizing the process of creation and rather innovation. If you can use it open education resources for such a purpose and not for the content based courses and memorization and instructional design where you are leading the student go by this path and you will reach here and I will examine you whether you have reached properly or not. But that is not the education. That is not the evaluation system. Evaluation system should be what are the problems you are faced? What are the knowledge you have used? What are the so far the experience you have used and in what way you have solved your problems? Is this sort of innovative approach for every education rather a right kind of approach for the future education? It is not so much as instructional design where you are talking about learning design. Learning path. Learning path of each student which can be different. So how this open and distance learning processes will In fact we are doing experiments and creating a program of teacher education and in the teacher education we are using this for elements. When it is a learning loadout but then rather learning them identifying the futures that is scenarios then how to identify situational problems. So scenario situations and then the solving those problems and using all sorts of knowledge also sort of essential skills to solve those problems satisfactorily. Satisfactorily for my purpose satisfactorily for others purpose work has to be done in such a way that you added and more learning you add technology to it and rather convert your work to a higher and higher quality and higher and higher usefulness resulting socially useful and productive work. In fact social usefulness links your work and education with the community and society. Social productivity change rather increases the social productivity and social empowerment. We have to go through these four processes learning, developing, creating values and many times in a group work we can create what you can call open resources, social capital, social wealth and it treats this as common, common to be used by everybody. So that is one and then use it or use the value creation to transform oneself groups and communities into a new society and that is a social transformation or social reconstruction for the futures. I would like to add last comment. We are talking about the use of technology appropriate or emerging in 21st century connected society technologies and when you use all the new technologies, new processes of social networking blogs, self expression, all sorts of new processes are coming. If you use all these technologies what you are creating as an education system is not in the same old model and design. So it is not a formal not an informal, not a non formal. It is a different one and this is education for transformation. This is a transformative mode of education. I think that will be the right description of this new educational mode. Thank you for being with us and sharing your views about learning for development. Thank you.