In India, it was the University of Delhi which introduced correspondence education for the first time in 1962, through the mechanism of what came to be called the School of Correspondence Courses and Continuing Education. The University of Delhi, as you know, is a conventional face-to face teaching institution. By establishing the School, it became a dual mode institution catering to both the on-campus and the off-campus students. Subsequently, many more universities and institutions of higher learning became dual mode in order to extend their reach to larger number of students. Today, there are around 62 such institutions in the country, and the academicism-functional mechanisms for the purpose have been named differently as departments, directorates, schools, divisions etc. In most cases these units have little autonomy, as the decision making is dominated by the units engaged in conventional face-to-face teaching. The academic programmes, course content, assessment schemes and operations are all governed by the authorities and bodies of the institutions in which the correspondence or distance education units have, at best, limited influence. Consequently, these units cannot bring in innovations, and their entire effort goes into establishing proximity with the conventional norms. Again, not all the units are structured in the same way. In some cases, the units have their own academic staff who do not participate in conventional teaching; in some cases, the academic staff is on secondment (deputation) from the parent departments of the university concerned, and then there are some which have no academic staff at all ( on full-time basis) and function as mere administrative units. The study conducted by Valicha (1990) revealed that DEIs in India need drastic changes in almost all areas of functioning including organizational structures and processes, to make them more effective in imparting education to distance learners.

Governance and Leadership

Organisation and Leadership

For governance, the