 . . . . . . . different time zones and we are glad to see such a great gathering of audience, learner, delegates from academia, dignitaries, guests from across a different state of the country and abroad. My name is Chanika Sinnapati and I feel privileged to welcome you all on behalf of Krishna Kanto Hondikoi State of the University to the seventh Krishna Kanto Hondikoi Memorial Lecture 2021. On this occasion of birth anniversary of Prof. Krishna Kanto Hondikoi, the Krishna Kanto Hondikoi Memorial Lecture has been organized from the last six years and like the last year, this year also due to COVID-19 pandemic situation, we are organizing this special occasion in a digital platform and to grace this occasion, indeed it's a matter of great pride and privilege to have here with us Sir John Daniel, Chancellor at Sundas School of Management, Vancouver, Canada. Before moving further, here I would like to inform that there will be a question and answer session just after the presentation of the Memorial Lecture. I request all to post your queries or questions if any in the chat box so that we can take it later on in the question and answer session. And also if anybody wants to put their question in as Miss Language, they can do so and we'll get it translated in English. And I request everyone to be very brief in asking the question. May I now request Prof. Joydeep Borua, the convener of the organizing committee to present the opening remarks. Over to you Sir. Thank you. Honourable Pious Chancellor Prof. Kondrapadas, Resister Dr. Arupdhiti Sodhari Sir, Dean Dr. Dibrodhiti Mohantasar, Speaker for the occasion, Sir John Daniel, Respected Prof. Ranjit Kumar Debhaguswamy, dignitaries and guests joining us from across the world, esteemed colleagues, students, participants present in this virtual platform. Good evening, good morning to some and welcome. We have gathered this evening on the occasion of the 7th Krishnakanta Khandikoi Memorial Lecture, which our university organizes annually as a tribute to as well as a celebration of extraordinary scholarship of late Prof. Krishnakanta Khandikoi. As we are amidst unusual time due to the current pandemic, this year we are organizing the lecture online. We are honoured and privileged that Sir John Daniel has kindly agreed to deliver this year's lecture. I am also pleased to inform that Ahola Gogoi, the daughter of late Prof. Khandikoi, has conveyed her blessings and best wishes for today's programme. She is not being able to join us as she is unwell, but she has conveyed her best wishes to us. So without further ado, I would like to request Honourable Vice-Centralor Prof. Khandipadas kindly to chair the programme and present his welcome address. Thank you. Thank you, Ahola Gogoi. Speaker of the Memorial Lecture, Sir John Daniel. Vice-Centralors and esteemed participants of various universities across the globe, Prof. Ranjit Kumar Debhaguswamy, former Vice-Centralors of the University, faculty members, officers, employees, research scholars, learners of the university, esteemed participants, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome. Good morning to you all participating from Canada and the US. Good afternoon to all esteemed colleagues participating from Europe and good evening to all from India and other parts of Asia. I can see our colleagues from Indonesia, Malaysia and Hong Kong and Japan. It is indeed a privilege for me to welcome you all to this Memorial Lecture organised on the 123rd birthday anniversary of the legendary scholar Krishnakanda Phondikoi. The Krishnakanda Phondikoi State Open University has been organising this lecture in memory of late Krishnakanda Phondikoi, a renowned indolentist, extraordinary erudite scholar, educationist and linguist, in whose name the university was established. This is the seventh lecture in the series which had to be held online due to a situation arising out of the current pandemic. The idea of this Memorial Lecture is to have an occasion for inviting eminent scholars in various fields and engage with deliberation on a topic of relevance and interest which can generate new ideas, imagination and academic enthusiasm. Last year, the lecture was delivered by Prof. Sergey Dimitrivis Serebrani, a renowned scholar of indology from Russian State University of Humanities Moscow. On the team, India and Russia revisiting the problems and issues of cultural relations. This year is particularly unique and also in many sense unprecedented. We still admit the pandemic about which there is more vagueness and ambiguity than certainty. We do not really know when the pandemic will get over for sure and if it gets over and what else, we are not very sure how the world around us will look like. What we are anticipating is a new normal which essentially suggests elements of fundamental change that evades us in the future. It is but natural that the new normal will also demand new thinking and the new approaches to life. As we have seen across the world, education has been a major casualty. And all of us are struggling hard to find a way out of this present problem. The present pandemic is more than one way has exposed the hidden fundamentalities and false lies in our society in general and in education in particular. And therefore, it is time to think about the social system afresh in order to build in greater resilience and responsiveness. In this context, today's topic of the lecture from response to resilience, preparing for the use of open distance learning in the next crisis is extremely relevant and particularly interesting. We are indeed very honoured and delighted to have Sir John Daniel amongst us this evening to deliver it on this topic and who could be a better person than Sir John to look up for this theme. I take the pleasure and privilege of welcoming Sir John Daniel and would like to introduce him to our audience very briefly. Sir John Daniel is one of the most respected and globally known academic in the field of open and distance learning. He is presently the Chancellor of Ascender School of Management, Vancouver, Canada. During 2004-2012, Sir John was the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Commonwealth of Learning. Prior to this, he was the Assistant Director General of Education at the University and the Vice Chancellor of Open University of the United Kingdom. In his long professional and academic career spanning nearly four decades, Sir John contributed profoundly to the educational development, quality enhancement, open learning and innovation. He holds key positions in numerous institutions, organizations, agencies and committees, several journals in their editorial book and has a large number of publications which have made lasting influential in the functioning of the audio system across the globe. For his contribution, he has been conferred by various universities, honorees, causes, by more than 30 universities all over the world. It is indeed an honor and privilege for us all that he has kindly agreed to deliver the 7th Sakhanda Khandikwai Memorial Lecture this evening. May I now request Sir John Daniel to kindly deliver his memorial lecture. Thank you. Before moving further, we would like to release the University newsletter. I would like to request Prof. Ranjit Kumar Debakusami Sir to do the honors and declare the horizon release. This is the newsletter, Horizon Volume 15, No. 2, 2021. Okay, I have great pleasure in releasing the issue of the horizon. Thank you. Thank you so much, Sir. So we would like to hear a few words from you briefly. I am glad that I could be here today with you and I think we will be able to read this issue of the horizon with pleasure and profit. Thank you all. I congratulate all those associated with the production of this newsletter. Thank you. Thank you so much, Sir. Thank you. Now, I would like to request Sir John Daniel to take over the platform and deliver the 7th Krishna Khandikwai Memorial Lecture on the topic from response to resilience preparing for the use of open and distance learning in the next crisis. Over to you, Sir. The platform is all yours and we look forward to listen to you. Thank you very much and good evening to you all. It is a great privilege to be asked to give the 7th Krishna Khandikwai Memorial Lecture, and I thank Professor Kandapa Das for his kind invitation, and I regret that this awful pandemic prevents me from being with you in person. During my career, I have made many visits to India, but never to your beautiful state of a sound. One of my very first trips to India in the early 1980s, I went to Hyderabad, visit the great Professor Ram Reddy, who had set up the Andhra Pradesh Open University in 1982. After he moved to establish the Indra Gandhi National Open University in 1985, I met him regularly, and it was a great privilege to be honoured with him by the International Council for Distance Education only a few months before his untimely death in 1995. I have been associated with the Open Universities of India for almost 40 years as President of the International Council for Distance Education, as Vice Chancellor of the UK Open University, as Assistant Director General for Education at UNESCO, and as President of the Commonwealth of Learning. It is a particular pleasure to speak today in honour of Krishna Khandikwai. I feel a great affinity with this wonderful scholar after whom your university is named. We both attended Oxford University and we both moved from there to the University of Paris. We both became Vice Chancellor of the Universities. However, we responded to those experiences in different ways. Professor Krishna Khandikwai became a great linguist knowing over 10 languages, whereas although my French is fluent, my knowledge of German, Italian, Russian and Spanish is only rudimentary. On the other hand, he described his nine years as Vice Chancellor of Guwahati University as a sterile period. But my 11 years as Vice Chancellor of the UK Open University were the most exciting and rewarding period of my career. He was a great scholar, whereas despite my 400 publications, I am at best a practitioner scholar who tries to reflect intelligently on his experience of leading and managing universities. And that is what I shall do today. I wonder how Professor Krishna Khandikwai would have reflected on the state of higher education in India today. My title, as you've heard, is from response to resilience, preparing for the use of open and distance learning in the next crisis. And to this, I have added a subtitle, which is from the opening back in OER. We are slowly leaving behind the savage crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. These required rapid responses from power education institutions around the world. Now we need to prepare for the next crisis, which will surely come. I use the word resilience to mean that institutions must be tough enough to adapt to new circumstances and to survive without breaking up. But in the case of open universities like yours, I go further. Your challenge is not merely to survive COVID-19 and future crises, but to remain at the leading edge of the adaptation of higher education to changing technologies and to societies evolving needs. That is how I interpret the significance of the word open in Krishna Khandikwai State Open University. The history of distance education will be a thread running through this talk. And it will lead us to the present day when the COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated considerable expansion of distance learning, although much of its spread should better be called emergency remote teaching. What has been the impact of the pandemic? What has been both good and bad? The good outcome of all the remote teaching of the last 18 months is that millions of students and teachers on school and university campuses have acquired some experience of distance learning and distance teaching. And many have come to appreciate its advantages. The bad result is that this surge of remote teaching has usually removed the word open from the term open and distance learning. Institutions have focused on students who were previously in their classrooms, so it was really closed distance learning. But openness has been an essential theme and purpose of the development of distance education. And it is vital that we put that inspiring word open back into open distance learning. I start with some history. Most of you are familiar with the narrative. But many people who first experienced distance education during the COVID-19 pandemic assume that ODL began with the emergence of the Internet in the late 1990s. It really began much earlier. And the principles of good distance teaching that have been developed over more than a century are equally valid today. Although they are often forgotten until bitter experience reminds teachers and institutions about them. The development of distance education has paralleled the emergence of technologies that facilitate communication when teachers and learners are separated. Gutenberg's invention of printing in the 15th century was a first milestone. Instead of having to go to universities to hear lecturers read from the few manuscripts available, students could now access printed books themselves, giving them more choices of places and times to study. We jumped from Gutenberg to the building of railways in the 19th century, which allowed countries to create postal systems. Sir Isaac Pittman had invented shorthand in 1837. And following the introduction of universal postal rates across Britain in the 1940s, he offered the world's first distance education course. He taught shorthand by mailing texts transcribed into shorthand on postcards and receiving transcriptions in return from his students for correction. Pittman's crucial innovation was giving feedback to students. And his motto was time saved is life gained, which I think captures nicely the advantages of both shorthand and distance education. Although a few public school systems and universities offered some correspondence courses over the next century, distance education was mostly conducted commercially and students struggled to achieve a reputation for quality, even when it was offered by public universities in India. But that situation changed dramatically with the creation in 1971 of the UK Open University. The UKAU's inspiring slogan, open to people, open to places and open to methods and open to ideas springs to mind when we think of that great innovation. But please note that the driving motivation of Walter Perry, the founding vice chancellor of the UKAU was to improve the quality of teaching in all universities. Before coming to the UKAU, Perry had been deputy principal of Edinburgh University, where he observed that the quality of teaching in campus universities was usually dismal. He believed that if the open university could be an exemplary of good teaching, it would raise the level of teaching in all universities. Think about that. Is KKHSAU an exemplary of good teaching today? Are the campus universities following your example? So what did the UKAU do differently? Perry considered that its most important innovation was the course team. As the UKAU website puts it and I quote, modules are developed by multidisciplinary course teams comprising first academics, educational technologists and media specialists contributing pedagogic and technical expertise. Second, respected academics from other universities working alongside OU colleagues. Third, external examiners and it continues, this model helped to build the university's reputation for innovation, rigor and quality and has been adopted by distance teaching institutions worldwide. End of quote. Perry once said that the UKAU had institutionalized innovation and he believed that the course teams were the key driver of its constant renewal. When I used the word open earlier to mean the capacity to adapt effectively to new challenges, this constant renewal is what I meant. Does KKHSAU have mechanisms for constant renewal? Now while Perry sought to improve the quality of teaching, others saw openness as the UKAU's radical innovation. For as well as teaching at a distance and being open to places, the UKAU declared that it was open to people by removing all academic prerequisites for undergraduate admission. The basis for admission was first come first served up to the capacity that the institution could cope with. The phrase open to methods also reinforced the expansion of access. Because broadcasting on the BBC's public radio and television channels was part of the UKAU's multimedia teaching strategy. Harold Wilson, the UK prime minister who launched the idea of the open university, first called it the University of the Air. And he considered that an important manifestation of openness and access was enabling the general public to join students in watching the university teach on TV and listening to its radio programs. And it's good to see that occurring extensively in India today. The UKAU was formally launched in the week of the first moon landing in 1969. And at the ceremony, its first chancellor Lord Crowther exorted it to be open to ideas with these words, I quote. The happy chance it is that we start on this task in this very week when the universe has opened. The word has a new meaning hence forward, the limits, not only of exploreable space, but of human understanding are infinitely wider than we believed. End of quote. The creation of the UKAU inspired similar developments in other jurisdictions and KKHSAU is an inheritor of that tradition. There are now some 50 institutions around the world called open universities. And the Commonwealth of Learning has documented the many open universities in the Commonwealth. Today, my subtitle is putting the open back into ODL. Why is that so important? The challenging reality is that many millions more people will seek education and training at all levels in the next 20 years. When I served as assistant director general for education at UNESCO. My most important task was to give new impetus to the campaign for education for all that began in 1990 and had been given fresh momentum by World Forum held in Dakar, Senegal in 2000. The early years of this century saw an intense focus on getting all students, all children into primary school. And by our target date of 2015, this campaign had achieved success at getting most young children into school. Primary school net enrollment rose from 84% in 1999 to 93% in 2015. But progress then stalled with 58 million children still not in school and 100 million not completing their primary studies. COVID-19 has only exacerbated existing inequalities. In low income countries, only 34% of children from the poorest fifth of households complete school compared to 79% from the richest fifth. And as you know, this is a serious challenge in India. Education campaign revealed, however, that universal secondary education would be a much more challenging goal. An estimate in 2006 indicated that nearly 400 million children between the ages of 12 and 17 did not attend secondary school. And that figure was still 200 million in 2018. So schooling remains a huge challenge. The UN estimates that in 2030 over 200 million children will still be out of school. Now India is a world leader in developing solutions. Because you established a national open school in 1989. Renamed the National Institute of Open Schooling in 2002. It became an apex body for distance learning with responsibility for facilitating the development of a network of state open schools. The NIOS has been very successful. It has 2.2 million pupils and admits another 350,000 annually. All this with a central staff of only 250 for over 2 million pupils. The tutors and mentors who support the pupils work in 11 regional centers and 3,260 study centers located in accredited institutions of various kinds all over the country. However, the situation of India's state open school is mixed. 10 years ago, a report on them concluded and I quote, Taking an overall view, one cannot escape the conclusion that with very few exceptions, the state open schools resemble atrophied limbs of the state education department. They are like rudderless ships set adrift in a sea of low morale. And this is a poignant situation when one considers the immense potential of state open schools to bring about a sea change in the social setup and improve the well being of the underprivileged people. End of quotation. Now you will know better than I whether this assessment is still true. But I note two points. First, it is not easy to establish an ODL institution that can function at scale with a hugely diverse body of pupils. But second, we need these open schools to be successful to help people acquire the skills and knowledge to lead fulfilling lives. This is why we must put the open back into ODL. Distance education at scale is necessary because growing numbers of people worldwide, numbering in the hundreds of millions have no access to the education and training that might help them enjoy better lives. The key areas of need are secondary school, secondary schooling for the hard to reach, tertiary education and new skills and knowledge for coping with the post pandemic world. The core of the UN's sustainable development goals embraces all these themes. It states, and I quote, ensure exclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong proper learning opportunities for all. We include seven targets, and we note two in particular. For one, ensure that all girls and boys complete free equitable and quality primary and secondary education, leading to effective and relevant learning outcomes. We ensure equal access for all women and men to affordable and quality technical vocational and tertiary education, including university. Each target covers hundreds of millions of people, and I've already talked about target for one. For three is about access to tertiary education, which did not figure at all in the millennium development goals of 2000. Its inclusion in the more recent sustainable development goals reflects governments increasing understanding of the contribution of higher education to economic and social development. With larger numbers, completing secondary school, and societies becoming more complex, demand for tertiary education has grown rapidly. Official estimates of the future demand for tertiary education have usually been gross underestimates. Nearly 30 years ago, in my book, mega universities, I wrote the quote, population growth is outpacing the world's capacity to give people access to universities. A sizeable new university would now be needed every week, merely to sustain current participation rates in higher education. New institutions are not being created at this frequency, so a crisis of access lies ahead, end of quote. In this century, the demand for tertiary education has continued to accelerate. Global enrollments are predicted to grow from 250 million in 2020 to nearly 600 million in 2040. And this assumes that enrollment ratios worldwide will rise from 2,700 per 100,000 of population to 6,500 per 100,000 population. Participation rates will grow everywhere, with the share of the population educated to degree level reaching around 50% in countries such as Canada, Finland, Singapore and South Korea by 2050. Although these projections were made before the COVID-19 pandemic, its fallout seems likely to increase demand further. However rapidly campus institutions may grow in response, open distance learning at scale will be a major component of the solution. Not least, because the global response to climate change will favor education systems that are less carbon intensive. And that poses a challenge for open universities like yours, because technologies and expectations have evolved since the creation of the UK Open University 50 years ago. In particular, that means the Internet, which unlike earlier distance learning media was seized on by campus institutions when they had to teach remotely. The challenge for open universities is to use this new technology appropriately for their own students, but appropriate technology is a moving target. I will remember giving my annual address to the Congress of the UK OU student associations in the mid 90s. Afterwards, they chastised me saying that the open university was moving too quickly to require them to work with computers and go online. Yet when I went back to address the same student Congress two years later, they complained that the university was not moving fast enough. I suspect that you know the feeling. Your challenge is to be fully aware of the leading edge of educational technology. But to use the trailing edge in your teaching to ensure that it is accessible to your students. However, the trailing edge moves quickly too. It may be too early for you to use artificial intelligence and virtual reality. But for example, you should stay ahead of the campus universities in using technology for remote tutoring and examinations. SDG target for three also includes tertiary continuing education. MOOCs massive open online courses are a 21st century example of conducting distance education at scale for a global audience. Around 2010, some university computing academics used the internet to attempt computer based teaching across the globe. For me, it recalled the moment in the mid 19th century, when the inventor of short answer Isaac Pittman decided to teach his new language by correspondence using the newly created postal service. And as enthusiasm for MOOCs burgeoned the universities that had started them realize that they could not satisfy the demand by relying solely on their own academics. So they invited other universities to join in suggesting to them that offering short courses to huge global audiences would be an attractive way to enhance their reputations. The final definition of MOOCs is quote a course of study made available over the internet without charge to a very large number of people and definition. This definition highlights the easy come easy go nature of MOOCs. Although completion rates are usually very low, the huge worldwide enrollments in MOOCs indicate that they are a legitimate manifestation of open and distance learning. The number of MOOC learners worldwide was estimated at 180 million in 2020. They were studying some 16,000 MOOCs offered by nearly 1000 universities. One third of all learners who ever registered on a MOOC platform did so in 2020, which was evidence of the pandemic induced surge of interest in free online learning. Another example of this was that the UK Open University saw the number of visitors to its open learn website of 1000 free courses jumped from 8.9 million in 2019 to 13.6 million in 2020. And surveys showed that one in seven UK adults started an online course during the pandemic, which is a huge number. I've urged you to become more resilient and to be open to new trends. Here is the final one that I will mention. The pandemic has greatly increased public interest in open and distance learning. It has also led to a demand for shorter courses on newer topics that can be taken at any time at the learners convenience. Open universities, including yours, should be at the forefront of responding to those new demands and these new trends. So, in closing, I pay homage once again to the memory of Krishna Kantahandiqui and I leave you with the inspiring founding slogan of the UK Open University. To be open to people, open to methods, open to ideas and open to places. Keep that in mind and KKHSOU is assured of a bright future. I wish you well. Thank you. Thank you so much, sir. It was wonderful listening to you, sir. And we extend our heartfelt gratitude to you for gracing this occasion with your truck for booking lecture and enlightening us with your wisdom. And yes, truly said that we have to adopt ourselves with the new circumstances and the crisis that we are facing. And not merely survive but remain and to cope up with and adopt with the changing technology and to disseminate knowledge to every look and corner of the state. Thank you so much. So, ladies and gentlemen, now we'll have a question and answer session. We really understand that this is an opportunity for many of us to interact with Sir John Daniel, one to interaction with one to one with him, but constant of time allows us to be very brief. So those who have any question can unmute themselves and put their questions. Kanika, can I start? Sure, sir. Okay. Thank you. Sir, thank you very much for your wonderful lecture. I always enjoy your lecture since the first time I heard you in 100 in 2008 in the PCF. As a response to the pandemic crisis, our university tried our best to innovate new ways. One of the thing we tried is the e-mentoring system. We tried to form groups in WhatsApp and telegram, assign those groups to our faculty members to mentor them academically and also in all other ways. So I understand the UK Open University was the pioneer in this type of mentoring. I would like to just request you, can you just lead a little bit till the last about the experience of UK Open University. Also, I understand in South Africa this experiment was done on e-mentoring, how we should move ahead, how we should proceed from your experiences. Thank you, sir. Yes, well, of course, when the Open University began, one of the conclusions that Walter Perry and his team had was that the low reputation of correspondence education was partly due to the fact that there was very little feedback and tutoring to the students. So they set up a very extensive network of tutoring in those early years. They created 13 regional centers which in some ways many universities in their own right. And those regional centers organized a very large staff of part-time tutors who would offer the chance to meet groups of students. There was usually one tutor for every 25 students. The meetings were optional and voluntary, they were not compulsory, but students who wanted to could go along in the evening once every two weeks or so and meet their tutor for a session of discussing the course materials and so on. This, I think, had a huge impact on the success of the Open University. Over the course of my 11 years as Vice Chancellor, I spoke to 50,000 students as they came across the stage to receive their degrees. And as I talked to them time and again, the students would say to me, the thing that got me through the Open University that helped me to succeed in this very difficult way of getting a degree was my tutor. So the Open University was extremely dependent on these tutors and when I was Vice Chancellor, there was something like 10,000 of these tutors all over the country and all over Europe. As of course the internet became more prevalent, the Open University has moved a lot of that tutoring onto e-tutoring and e-mentoring, but still with the principle that the groups for each tutor are relatively small and that the experience is voluntary, but that students can still have this opportunity to talk to tutors. I think they've done some interesting experimentation and no doubt you too have worked with this, that if you're doing a live e-tutoring, even a group of 25 is a very large group. So you need to break it down into smaller groups and chat rooms and so on, so that small groups of people can discuss and then come back together. So I think there's a whole emerging technology of using these e-mentoring techniques to do tutoring, but I think the conclusion is that it is still very important and what really distinguishes to my mind a good open and distance learning from low quality open and distance learning is this possibility of feedback and interaction with students. The fact is, and this is why the Open University UK made this optional in our experience and I think in the experience of most distance teaching universities, one third of students depend quite heavily on this mentoring function. One third of students, they don't need it at all and they hardly bother with it because they're good independent learners. Another third or somewhere in between will use it sometimes, but not all the time. But if you are trying to be open and increase not just access, but access to success, then I think it is very important that this facility be there. I think important as you do this to operate by trial and error to try things to encourage your faculty and your tutors to use these e-mentoring platforms in different ways to find what works best and what gives the students the best experiences. And of course these platforms are evolving all the time. So what was possible two years ago is less than what is possible now. Conclusion, mentoring, tutoring is a very important part of a successful open and distance learning institution. Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. There is one question raised by Dr. Ritimoni Bordoloi. So she has asked, in what way the human pedagogy can be used as a part of the resilient education approach in this current as well as future crisis. I think what we have to remember is that learning is often more about what the student does than what the teacher does. Indeed, I was talking just now about tutoring at the Open University. We insisted that all tutors went through quite a rigorous training course in how to be open university tutors. The interesting part was that even those full time faculty who had developed the course but wanted to be tutors somewhere on that course had to go through this course. Because the whole point of tutoring was not to give another lecture and teach the whole thing over again, but to draw out the students and find what they were having difficulty with and what needed to be discussed further. I think the role of tutors is to mediate between the course materials which are presumably reasonably self sufficient and the students understanding of them. And it's by getting students to do things that you bring them out. I often joke perhaps that Oxford University which I attended is fundamentally a distance teaching institution. Because at Oxford University the lectures are not considered important at all. They're all optional and you're meant to go along the first week and see which ones are interesting and drop the ones that you don't like. But what you have to do every week is to write a fairly significant essay on a subject given you by your tutor and then go and present that to your tutor. So what I'm saying is that the onus is thrown back on the student to do the students own learning because that's the only learning that really counts. So, I think when we talk about pedagogy in open and distance learning, we've got to remember that the whole concept is not the teacher teaching, but the institution organizing a system, which obliges the student to do work that shows their understanding and then a system that enables tutors and faculty to correct and improve that understanding so that the student moves on. Thank you, sir, for your insight and the question. So there is one more question from associate professor Dr. Andy Liu. Dr. Andy Liu has asked, with the advent of technology, how do you see the evolution of self instructional or learning materials in years to come? Well, there is huge evolution in that field and what is wonderful and we all experience this in our daily lives. I experienced it in preparing this lecture that there is a huge amount of information, knowledge, wisdom, whatever you like to call it, available just by clicking on the internet. So that the possibilities that students have to learn by themselves are even greater than they ever were. And for most distance learning students back 50 years ago, access to libraries was difficult, even if they were allowed into the library in the university town, they had to get to it and so on, whereas now so much material is available at the click of a button. But it brings me back to another principle that I found extremely important in my career in this field. And that is that in order to have a good distance learning system, you must blend for the student independent learning activities and interactive learning activities. We just talked about the interactive learning activities where students interact with or meet with tutors to clarify their understanding of the concepts. But of course, a large part of distance learning did a large part of any learning takes place with the student studying independently. In the early days, this meant written course materials, television programs, radio programs, which they read, they watched, they listened to, and they were essentially doing that independently, although later they could go and discuss it with someone else. So those possibilities now are infinitely wider than they used to be, and independent learning is clearly much, much easier, and has much more attractive materials available. Nevertheless, I believe that in order for many students to anchor that independent learning in a deep understanding of the material they're studying, some kind of interaction with other people is necessary. That doesn't necessarily have to be with a tutor because I think one of the significant advantages of the tutor groups is interaction between the students themselves, because often a student is better at explaining to another student, a concept they're having with than a tutor for whom this concept has always been very obvious. So that's another dyad, if you like, dichotomy that I think you have to be conscious of balancing out independent study and interactive study. The challenge for you as an open university is that the independent study is essentially is a low cost, adding another student to read course materials to go and look at a website costs almost nothing. But of course the moment you're putting more human beings in the system as mentors, whether it's electronically or face to face, you are adding costs. To make a viable open university, you have to balance the independent learning and the interactive learning in a way that produces a viable structure from a cost point of view. But that of course has been done by many institutions. Thank you, sir, for addressing the question. So, there is again a very interesting question raised by Dr. Bhaskar Swarma, he's the assistant professor in economics, KK Hanick State University. He has asked, just like many countries have constitutionally declared right to education and right to information to their citizens, do you think the next thing is to adopt right to quality net connectivity. The current pandemic suggests such as urgent need is there even to promote quality education through the use of technology. So what is your view on this issue. Yes, I think there have been some very bad consequences of the pandemic, not least the fact that it has increased existing inequalities. However, really leading off from that, I see around the world governments realizing that one of their key challenges for the future is to make accessibility to the internet to make connectivity widely available in the community. And I think that is going to be a major emphasis of many governments, of course, technology is marching on rapidly so that becomes much easier than it used to be. And indeed, if you look around the world, often the exploration of new ways of using connectivity have been done better and more energetically in countries in Africa than in countries in the west. Online telephone banking has grown faster in a country like Kenya, then it has, then it has in Canada. So I do believe that that is one consequence of the pandemic, which will be beneficial, because governments have realized, I mean, even just for the, for the problem of getting government information to people that if people are not connected in any way, that becomes much more difficult. So yes, I'm personally I've worked in the United Nations system at UNESCO. I'm always a little hesitant, a little doubtful about the value of declaring something a right. It's very easy to declare something a right, but it's much more difficult to actually make it effective. I mean, there are lots of declarations, most countries have resounding statements about human rights in their constitution, but you only have to look around the world to see that many countries are not really taking any notice of those of those declarations. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, if something has been declared a right, it does give the citizens a chance to go back at the government, mount legal challenges and say listen, You said that we had a right to universal primary education and yet there is no school in our neighborhood and the teachers aren't showing up for work and so on. So yes, I think it is quite useful to declare new rights, but that doesn't take you anywhere, unless there is energetic work to make sure that it is possible for people to exercise those rights. So having very good connectivity and Wi-Fi is fine, but unless you have a device that can connect to it, it doesn't take you, it doesn't take you very far. But that is one area where I do think the pandemic will have achieved some useful and lasting change. Thank you, sir. There is one more question from Dr. Prasenjith Das, he is an associate professor in English, Krishna Khandraman, State of the University. He wanted to know that how can the industry-academia relationship could be seen as the basis of a resilient education system to mitigate the present economic crisis in the country like India? Yes, I mentioned this at the very end of my talk. Many people and very many people in India were thrown out of work by the pandemic. They will be returning to work and the evidence so far seems to suggest that economies are picking up much faster than anyone expected, but they will probably pick up in slightly different ways. It won't be the same economy as it was before. And already, I'm told in some countries, there are huge skill shortages, many jobs vacant because there's no one to take them while at the same time, there are many people who are not employed. So the last part of my talk where I talked about short courses and things that you could take quickly didn't take long, got you some kind of a skill. These will be more and more important and I think that you at KKHSO, you have got to decide to what extent you want to get involved in that because even if you're not a vocational institution, there is probably a role given your technology and your powerful way of getting to people to look at microcredential short courses. But in order to do this effectively, you clearly have to work with the industry. It's the IT industry that knows what it needs in terms of people with new skills and can help you design those courses so that many of the people doing this are using people from the industry to determine what the course should be. And these courses will not last forever. They're short courses, you offer them, next year it has to be a slightly different course because technology has changed. But there is as we saw during the pandemic, a huge demand out there for easily accessible, partly online learning experiences that very quickly give you some new skill. I mean, the one we all talk about is coding, but there are lots more skills than coding that people are looking for. And that is, I think, something that open universities can be particularly good at. I know the UK Open University has offered quite a number of new short courses to help people get back into the workforce. And those are not just on areas of, if you like, jobs and particular skills. They found that there's a terrific demand for short courses on managing your personal finances because the pandemic obviously had a huge impact and often a very bad impact on people's personal finances as they lost work and so on. So there are all kinds of opportunities to find subjects that people want to study, but they want to study them now. They don't want to spend two years over it. They want to spend a week or two or three. And this is an opportunity that I think you should be looking at very seriously. Thank you so much, sir, for giving this valuable insights and knowing the audience with your knowledge and experience. And thank you so much for being a part of the 7th Krishnakanta Hondikoi Memorial Lecture. So, ladies and gentlemen, as we approach the winding moments of the 7th Krishnakanta Hondikoi Memorial Lecture 2021, may I now call upon Prof. Orupji Choudhuri, Dr. Orupji Choudhuri, Race Chair and Chairperson of the Organizing Committee to please present the vote of these. Honorable Vice Chancellor and Chairman of the Organizing Committee and the program today. I take this opportunity to thank Sir John Daniel for laying down the philosophy of mainstreaming audio from response to resilience with emphasis of a new philosophy in the form of responding to the crisis and making it in continuity and perpetuity to the form of resilience. And that is the spirit that may be described as the new audio. We do observe, sir, that in the entire audio system, there are a trend of alienation of the learner. At times, it is even the learner becomes the person on non-grata to address the situation. The Honorable Vice Chancellor of this University has placed before us the philosophy of total learning. In total learning, sir, it is a learner-friendly system, effective learner backup. Here the benefit of doubt goes to the learner and it is a learner's entity that is the symptom of the entire philosophy of total learning. Now, after the series of measures introduced by our University, sir, the learner is no longer the person on non-grata, but the learner seems to be today is the interstellar's lunar minores that is the sun around which the entire system of ODL revolves around. In KKHSO, sir, we are all committed to this idea of total learning, which is the reflection of what it has been stated by you with all the technological strategies with all the new points in the offing. With the help of which, the learner could be made quite comfortable in the system. I therefore request all of you to give us your active cooperation so that we can reach our goal. We can make a situation where the learner is in a friendly atmosphere. They can learn, they can achieve their goal and we too could achieve the goal of total learning. So thank you very much and for making this evening and for many this morning a wonderful one. I thank Professor Daniel once again and thank you very much. Thank you all for making this virtual winter success. Thank you so much and stay safe. Thank you. We come close to the station. So we close today's webinar. Thank you. Thank you all once again. Thank you.