Media for Distance Education

Abstract

Education can be thought of as the process of adding value to life. Apart from its fundamental goal of gathering knowledge, it has manifold long term objectives. One may say that education focuses at (i) value creation, (ii) economic viability, (iii) broadening of perspective, and (iv) enhanced social outreach. It should help an individual mold his/her personality, earn a living, which in turn accounts for his/her social health and lifestyle. It is hard to define the efficiency of educational systems from the value creation point of view since objective measures of value are not possible. In order to devise some means to quantify the efficiency of education, it would have to be treated more like a commodity rather than an abstract concept of knowledge. In this aspect, educational systems may be modeled as commodity markets whose performance measure is given by the throughput of the system. We define the throughput to be the average number of students graduating per year per instructor for a given curriculum.