Establishment Project of NGO Open-School Forum in South–Asia (NOFSA)
Background
Open Schooling has been very popular for bringing the equity in education through imparting training and education to physically and socially disadvantaged, and dropouts. The National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS), India, the largest open school in the world, and the Open School (OS) of the Bangladesh Open University (BOU) already proved the strength of open schooling in the field of education. In addition, India established 9 more State Open Schools for ‘reaching the unreached’. Pakistan has also tremendous progress in Open Schooling and Sri Lanka also established the Open School. Open Schooling has become an important tool, in South-Asia region, to expand access to education. Open Schooling System should be widely promoted and strengthened in this region as the nations are culturally nearly homogeneous. These promotional and strengthening initiatives can be easily done through partnership education program through NGOs. In South-Asia region, NGOs are very active actors in providing basic education and education for neo-literates through their non-formal settings. The Open School System provides alternative schooling to neo-literates who have acquired functional literacy, so that they can continue their education at their own pace. BOU OS, NIOS and the State Open Schools (SOS) provide alternative means to acquire secondary-level education in a flexible manner. On the other hand, NGOs are very much professional to provide functional literacy and basic education. But they have some sort of gaps and these gaps can be bridged through open schooling. Junior School Certificate (JSC) Program of the BOU Open School for grade 6-8 is the important example of filling the gap. JSC has been launched to provide education to the disadvantaged children who did their primary education from the NGO run Non-formal/community schools. This is being implemented through Campaign for Popular Education (CAMPE), an NGO coalition. This program itself formed a NGO-Open School Forum in Bangladesh. In India and Pakistan, open schooling has also strong relation with NGOs. In order to systematize the interaction between the OS and the NGOs and other agencies, it is the time to consider establishing an NGO-Open School forum in the South-Asia religion.
Aims and objectives of NOFSA are:
- to share of resources, expertise and experiences
- to provide professional, technical and academic support in setting up new the partnership educational program
- to hold training workshop for human resource development
- to organize national and international conferences/seminars on Open Schooling
- to promote Research and Development activities on Open Schooling
Modus Operandi
National and State Open Schools and related NGOs/other agencies will be the member of the Forum. Each organization will have a Nodal Officer for contacting different aspects in accordance with the objectives of the forum. Wikieducator will extensively be using as platform for interaction.
Steps to form the Forum
i) collecting contact details of the Open Schools and NGOs
ii) approaching the concept to the concerned organizations
iii) asking nominations for nodal officers
iv) creating goggle group for interactions
v) financial planning and funding issues
vi) to hold 3 two-day conferences with 50 people where there will be 30 national and 20 international participants respectively in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India
Time Frame
i + ii + iii + iv: May – July 2008 vi (a): Conference in Pakistan – September 2008 vi (b): Conference in Bangladesh – October 2008 vi (c): Conference in India – November 2008
Md. Mizanoor Rahman
Asst. Professor and JSC Project Coordinator
Open School, Bangladesh Open University
Email. mizan2006@yahoo.com
