The first session of the Webinar series was successfully organized by the Department of Tribal Heritage and Tribal Indology, School of Education and Extension, Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences-Deemed to be University which was held on 11th June 2020 at 3.15 pm. The hon’ble speaker of the day was Dr. Syed Abdul Moin, Sr. Consultant, UNICEF. He was the Former Director of SCERT, Patna. Dr, Moin has a vast and diverse experience of working at different levels of Teacher Education system since last three decades. Dr. Moin has worked as a member of many academic bodies at State and National level and has coordinated many educational programmes.

The topic of the day was “Open and Distance: Means for Continuous Education”. Dr. Sushree S. Mohanty, Deputy Director-cum-Assistant Professor coordinated the session and Dr. Manoj Kumar Behera, Associate Dean and Dean (I/c), School of Education and Extension moderated the session. The session started with a warm welcome to all by Dr.Manoj Kumar Behera. Hon’ble Vice-Chancellor KISS-DU Prof. (Dr.) Harekrushna Satpathy introduced the speaker and also introduced the topic. He emphasized on the importance of the topic in present scenario when the World is facing such a pandemic- COVID19.

Dr. Moin started his talk with different ways of Alternative education specially incase of marginalized & disadvantaged groups of the society for example the Tribals. He elaborated the concept of open and distance learning, its history, advantages and disadvantages. He threw light on the challenges faced in implementing open and distance learning especially for the marginalized & disadvantaged groups. The major points of concern were the non-formal means of education i.e. Correspondence mode and other On-line learning strategies. The entire discussion was based on his own field experiences, which made the session livelier. He also presented his State Model of ODL for training of untrained teachers with an advice to take it as an example and to develop new innovative means for smooth application of open and distance learning for the disadvantaged groups.

The session winded up with a wonderful question-answer session. At the end Ms. Guddi Saktinanda, HoD, Department of Education proposed the vote of thanks.

  • Moderator- Manoj Kumar Behera, Associate Dean and Dean (I/c), School of Education and Extension, Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences-Deemed-to-be-University
  • Coordinator- Sushree S. Mohanty, Deputy Director-cum Assistant Professor, Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences-Deemed-to-be-University