ABSTRACT
Ten years have passed since the international community adopted the six Education for All goals in Dakar in 2000. The number of children out of school has dropped by 33 million worldwide and considerable progress has been made towards achieving universal primary education. However, there is a corresponding increase in demand for secondary schooling in the developing countries. Open and distance schools are increasingly recognized as a solution to this growing demand. Such schools are found in all parts of the world – the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) identifies 80 schools in the Commonwealth countries alone. Rumble and Koul (2007) find that while open schooling may have low status, be underfunded and sometimes yield poorer results than conventional schools, it certainly succeeds in providing education for remote and socially disadvantaged communities in ways never before possible. In this chapter, we examine the challenges of providing quality education in two of the world’s largest open schooling systems – the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) in India and the Open Junior Secondary School (OJSS) in Indonesia.
