Lessons From The Flying Club Get Together

We the SFC and the Peer Group members take satisfaction from the free and frank exchange of views which took place on the subject of formation of study groups at the Flying Club study centre on the 26th July 2009. .We have noted the several suggestions made by the students including the formation of a website to display counselling schedules and other matters. In the process of organising the get together we met a large number of students at the study centre. We also talked on phone, corresponded through email,SMS and ordinary post to exchange views on formation of study groups and also on the student problems in Australia(which we have been discussing on the blog). In this way we were able to interract with majority of the active students of the 700 strong study centre.
It is correct that the expected number of students did not turn up on that day.But the positive side was the free and frank exchange of views on that day. Several students who were nervous about interracting got a chance to speak and socialise.Some of the parents who had come also expressed happiness that such opportunities for interraction existed. IGNOU students tend to miss out on these aspects of university life which the students of other universities tend to take for granted. Matters have not been helped by a market driven logic employed by the university where students are clients/customers and the university is a firm supplying materials etc. to the students. The student here becomes a customer looking for goods on the shelf rather than an active participant in the corporate life of the university.
Moreover we were not mobilising for a student demonstration.The purpose of the Student Faculty Cell and Peer Group is to enable students to solve their study related problems at their own pace and voluntarily with the senior students or ex students who in turn join this group voluntarily.(This indeed is the concept in UKOU).We want the students to work on this with the Peer Group at a time and place of their mutual convenience. The taking forward of the study processes is basic to this.You can at your pace of study avail the option of going to the peer group members to sort out your problems relating to studying, study materials etc.You can do it individually or in a group.This is merely a facilitative mechanism.
Too often we get caught in the logic of 'political' or 'political state' in evaluating and setting forth our study processes.This perhaps comes from the perspectives of 'Open University' as a political institution; a point emphasised, argued and taken up by several authors in the recent issues of UKOU's journal of 'Open Learning'.In these perspectives the civil society and the political state are confused.As a result the open universities have become entangled in a 'bureaucratic mindset. 'While we do not discount the importance of a healthy and facilitative educational bureaucracy, we definitely need to tackle the unresponsive situations the IGNOU students get caught up in.Everytime we go to a study centre we encounter student helplessness in the questions of getting study materials, assignments, grades not being entered on their cards etc.
It is here that we need to point out that our concepts facilitating study processes are not just a 'particularisation of the political state'(to paraphrase a well known 19th century thinker) and need to be demonstrated as such.It is in this demarcation that we will be able to tackle the 'political' and 'civil society' aspects which building up of study processes encounter.It is perhaps only in building up these study processes that we will be able to sort out the (19th century debate) whether it is with the notion of equation of 'political state' with 'civil society' which suspends the 'political' in the air or whether these differences of political and civil society exist historically and the political life is life in the airy regions-the ethereal regions of the civil society.Either way the university of the air and we have a task ahead.(SFC and PG Flying Club with the help of Mr. Ajay Mahurkar and Dr. Dolly Mathew)