Dynamics of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Quality Review: A Case of National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) of India

Abstract

The new e ducation agenda, also known as ‘Education 2030’ , is fully captured in Sustainable Development Goal 4 (Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all) (Statistical Yearbook for Asia and the Pacific, 2015 ) and its corresponding targets. Additionally , the World Education Forum 2015 (WEF 2015) adopted the Incheon Declaration 1 which calls for “meaningful education and training opportunities for the large population of out - of - school children and adolescents, who require immediate, targeted and sustained action ensuring that all children are in school and are learning”. In line with the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) - intergovernmental organization - created by Commonwealth Heads of Government in 1987 to promote the development and sharing of open and distance learning (ODL) knowledge, resources and technolog ies. COL has a full - fledged department to develop open schooling and open basic education (OBE) amongst commonwealth countries. The peer - to - peer (P2P) quality review between regional open schools has been an essential part of the COL’s mandate. Accordingly , COL initiated P2P activities in 2018 for development of common criteria for review of quality between NIOS and OS - BOU , and after that, it organized the visit to allow the review team to have a chance for the discussion of issues with a wide range of stakeholders thus providing the team with a variety of perspectives on regional and open schooling development policy in the South Asia region. After the visit, the review team prepa red a Peer Review Report (PRR). The two institutions, National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS), India and Open School, Bangladesh Open University (OS - BOU), Bangladesh, have agreed to conduct qual ity assurance audits based on an inter - institutional audit framework. In fact, this framework was developed in the Institutional Peer - to - Peer (p2p) Quality Assurance Workshop on May 2 - 4, 2017 at NIOS with the members from two organizations under the techno logy and financial support from the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), and subsequently, this was approved by the Academic Council of Bangladesh Open University. In addition, instrument for quality audit was also developed. This was qualitative rather quanti t a tive. During the workshop two institutes agreed to continue their p2p activities. It was also agreed to conduct the self - assessment of the institutes before the external audit. The NIOS Team visited BOU from 1 - 5 August 2018 and reviewed the quality assur ance process of the BOU Open School using the common criteria developed jointly with the BOU team. The audit team had gone through the self - assessment report on BOU Open School and finally, validated the report after auditing some parameters. Reciprocally, BOU team visited NIOS from 28 Feb to 1 March 2019 and reviewed the quality of the NIOS’s open schooling process and validated its self - assessment report prepared by the NIOS team through presenting the exit report // Paper ID 131