Study to Explore the Strategies to Increase Student Participation in Academic Counseling in the Programme Offered Through Open and Distance Learning Mode

When a learner joins a programme in open and distance learning university, he/she is assigned a ProgrammeStudy Centre (PSC) which is an approved and recognized Centre for the offered programme. Subject-wisecounseling is provided at the PSC by experienced academic counselors. The motivated learner of Indira GandhiNational Open University (IGNOU) is expected to go through the study material and clear his or her doubtsregarding the material during the counseling session. In a majority of the programmes of IGNOU, a minimum10% of total study hours are provided for counseling session, but in professional skill based programmes it variesand attendance is compulsory. For example, in the Post Basic BSc Nursing programme of IGNOU, for whichtarget population is in service nurses, the highly motivated learner joins the programme after entrance test andall in-service nurses take No Objection Certificate (NOC) from the organization as it is compulsory to attendtheory and Practical counseling every year for which they are expected to take leave for 50-54 days each year.It is a novelty of the programme that students do attend the counseling session and complete their attendancerequirement i.e., 75% attendance in theory and 90% attendance in practical, failing which they are not allowedto sit in the examination. Since the year 2008, the author is an academic counselor for one of the course of PostBasic BSc Nursing programme and has provided counseling for 12 hours for the batch of 30 students of the 1styear. Initially the author followed the traditional way of counseling i.e., doubt clarification and tutoring, butit was found that with this method, the student attendance in the class was always 12 to 15 students only, anda majority of them used to leave the class early. This irregularity was brought up in a focus group discussionand the following strategies, which were supported by other research studies also, were explored for enhancingstudent participation in the counselling sessions: (i) Counsellors should be student-friendly, (ii) Counsellingsessions could be made more interactive and friendly, (iii) The counsellor should facilitate group reading duringcounseling sessions, (iv) A topic can be given to the students for presentation, and (v) The counsellor should getin touch with the learner more often so that the communication gap is bridged. This study was carried out to explore the different strategies to increase student participation during academic counseling session the courses of Post Basic BSc Nursing programme of the Open and Distance Learning (ODL) system using a questionnaire. The semi structured questionnaire consisted of 20-25 items related to academic counseling, some suggested strategies, and the additional strategies. The respondents 30 learners of the ODL system. The list of strategies with role of academic counselor and learner will be made available for future use. It is expected that the results of this study will enable the other academic counselors to use suitable strategies to increase student participation in the counseling sessions. &nbsp