The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), the world’s largest open university, has exempted the fees of transgender students for all its programmes,” announced Prof Ravindra Kumar, Vice Chancellor of the university during his address at the 22nd Prof G Ram Reddy lecture at university headquarters in Delhi.
Earlier, Prof Ravindra Kumar in his presidential address paid homage to the founding VC of IGNOU Prof G. Ram Reddy and also expressed his gratitude to Promila Reddy for having come for the memorial lecture.
The university celebrates 2nd July every year and invites eminent educationists and scholars to deliver lecture on higher education especially in the open and distance learning domain.
Prof Y Vaikuntham, former VC, Kakatiya University, Telangana delivered the memorial lecture on ‘Education to the doorstep: from correspondence courses to distance and digital learning’. Prof M Jagdeesh Kumar, JNU VC was the chief guest for the event & delivered an engaging presentation on ‘learning to Teach and Teaching to learn’.
“The Government should give freedom and spend 6 per cent of the GDP on education. Main thrust should be to devise effective strategies to address the challenges for the growth of education in India and to realize the potential of the country’s demographic dividend as envisaged in the national education policy of the year 2016,” Prof. Vaikuntham said.
Prof M Jagdeesh Kumar, VC JNU elaborated about the transformational changes that have swept with technological advances in human lives and how these changes have been so overwhelming altering our lifestyles. He urged teaching community to give precedence to quality of life rather standard of living and to try imbibing those values in their students as well. He emphasised that a good teacher should look at the philosophical aspects of teaching as well and should not restrict it to the aesthetic exploration only.