The idea of liberation of any society is very proximate to the ideal of universal education. This dearness is a result of general understanding and recognition of the fact that only an educated society can take us from superstition to science, ignorance to intelligence and senselessness of life to significance of life. All modern day nation-states have realised the importance of a move towards universal education, and it stands as a prior subject in their business.

For universal education in a society, no specific model has been developed to this day as the world around is, to say the least, is complex and all matters causing deficiencies shall have to be treated specially, that is, everything that bars a person to have education needs to be treated in a manner that suits its persona and helps in overcoming all inhibitions.

An interesting answer to this demand comes in form of open schools and open universities, popularly known as people’s universities. These universities and schools enable those people to have education who couldn’t do so in normal ways because of the various abnormal terms life made them to live with. There are people who are pushed to give up their education for so many reasons or take up the jobs instead of completing their graduation or high school or people who cannot go to college or university for higher education anymore— open universities have been acting as an opportunity for all of these people from a long time. Credit based evaluation system allows candidates for greater time than usual course span to provide more chances for completion of their degree courses.

Most of the programmes within the fold of these open universities fall in the category of distance learning, which  facilitates students to keep up with their studies while doing other stuffs as well.Over the years open universities have evolved themselves to come at par with physical regular classroom universities. India’s largest open school of learning, Indira Gandhi National Open University, offers around 230 courses that includes certificate, diploma, graduate, post-graduate and doctoral level degree courses. Some more than 13 open universities have been very creative with respect to spectrum of courses it provides for.

Certificate courses such as Creative Writing and Bee Keeping and more modern day programmes such diplomas in audio production give fine insights about the vision that these universities are functioning with— a vision that takes them away from their fundamental charcter of student opting open university under duress to a character inheriting creativity and aiming at enhancing skill set of professionals working in various fields. Advent of technology and institutional efforts combined with its success of all these years has brought enough resources to university to set up more and more study centres in small town and cities other than its regional centres, which makes it more communicable and efficient for students.

In a country as diverse as India with its even large set of complexities, open universities are only available sources of education for a large lot of people. Amidst such scenario, on part of candidates, quality study material with  a blend of digital mode of learning has to be a genuine urge.