Engr. Md. Hakikur Rahman

Bangladesh Open University

Bangladesh.

Subtheme: Information and Communication Technologies; Networking and Resource Sharing & Interactivity in Learning Processes.

Bangladesh Open University (BOU) is the first of its kind in Bangladesh, offering provisions for continuing and extension education, professional and technical education to provide educational facilities to the rural disadvantaged groups, dropouts, working class, general mass through formal and non-formal programmes using Radio, Television and Computer in addition to conventional print media. Besides audio, video and data communications, the new IT has been used for developing resource and research materials implementing direct teaching and learning with low cost tutorial support in Distance Education.

The paper has been intended to explore exhaustively a new IT technique introduced at BOU and have plan to use it in future, presuming contemporary socio-economic status, convenanting bottleneck and shortfalls, exhibiting preferences and advantages to promote Distance Education through extending network resources using interactive multimedia techniques.

At present BOU has nearly 200,000 students enrolled throughout the country, dealt by 12 Regional Resource Centres (RRCs), 80 Local Centres (LCs) and nearly 700 Tutorial Centres (TCs). Within a short period the number may increase by many folds and it has became a real challenge for BOU to offer learning facilities to this enlarged number of students. BOU authority feels that, it would be the high time to adopt programmes utilising low-cost IT techniques feasible enough for the rural-based society to outreach BOU mission in Bangladesh.

Currently BOU has two Novell Servers connecting more than 100 workstations inside campus using fiber optics backbone of a LAN/WAN, One Windows NT Server operating as storehouse of a Oracle based software, SIMS (Student Information Management System), One Asynchronous Server communicating to Regional Resource Centres and other remote stations through standard dial-up procedure and One Linux Server providing e-mail services to more than 200 users inside and outside campus.

Work has been in progress to introduce interactive multimedia based courseware for different courses and at the beginning a course from School of Science and Technology in the programme of DCA would be introduced through interactive multimedia CDROM. A questionnaire has been developed to obtain the feedback from students responding to questions related to the courseware involving effectiveness, usability, availability and achievement. The first phase of the project has been restricted to the Dhaka RRC, though the urban based one, but with the largest number of students.

Scope would be there to include some other courses in the project after recommendation from the proper authority and obtaining feedback from the effectiveness of the existing one and also include other RRCs in phases.

Keywords: LAN/WAN, SIMS, DCA, CDROM.