ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Tertiary education is at the center stage of debate today, not as much for how it should be strategically planned and managed, nor even for internationalizing the curricular reforms, but as for how and from where it should be funded, and how to reduce the unit cost to break even without sacrifi cing quality. Privatization and/or private initiative has been one signifi cant option, even for countries like the Peoples Republic of China (World Bank, 2002); there is increasing proliferation of for-profi t institutions especially in the developed countries (Altbach, 1999); and distance and online learning is being adopted to generate resources besides providing for increasing access (Perraton & Lentell, 2004). As discussed in the fi rst chapter, consortia and alliances including virtual university education are fast emerging in this segment. Since tertiary education is breaking the traditional and elitist ivory towers, many enterprising ventures, including the service university (Tjeldvoll, 1998-99), entrepreneurial university (Clark, 1998), McUniversity (Rinne, 1999), and virtual university (Rumble & Latchem, 2004) are taking shape. Distance education, which ranges from the traditional print-based delivery at one end to fully online delivery at the other,
today occupies the centre stage in the debate on tertiary education. Th e preceding chapter focused on the issue of funding of distance education in the U.S. context. Th e present chapter takes the discussion forward to underline the practices, especially in the single mode open universities, from the Asian perspective. It focuses largely on the Indian sub-continent, which has one of the largest distance education systems in the world.
