A STUDY OF LEARNERS PERCEPTION AND ATTITUDE TOWARDS BA/BSS PROGRAM OF SSHL OF BANGLADESH OPEN UNIVERSITY

In the present day open and distance education has become a significant way of the development of higher education. Bangladesh Open University (BOU), the only public institution in Bangladesh offers several formal and non-formal programs from secondary to post graduate level through distance mode. The main objectives of BOU‘s program is to provide flexible and need based education particularly to the rural and disadvantaged groups like woman, agricultural workers, unemployed youths, uneducated adults, on-the-job people etc. The School of Social Science, Humanities and Language (SSHL) at the BOU offers Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Social Science (BA/BSS) to create efficient and skilled manpower in the country. The focuses of this paper is to find out learners‘ views and attitude towards BA/BSS program at BOU. In this study, 187 respondents were randomly selected from 15 tutorial centers of 2 Regional Resource centers (RRCs) of BOU. The study showed that 62% learners were male and the mean age of the learners was 34.05 years (minimum 22; maximum 54). More than 50% learners were married and nearly half (47.6%) of them were private employees and 86.6% were Muslims. Amongst them, 72.2% were come from urban areas and residing around 23.08 km from the tutorial centers. Most (72%) of the learners of BA/BSS program stated that the program was as usual but 24.1% expressed that it was difficult to understand but 97.7% learners responded that text materials were up to the mark. Regarding the media programs, 61% of the learners gave their opinion that TV programs were at the level best but they wanted to watch these at the evening or night schedule. It was surprising that 26.2% of the learners had bitter experience with the services of RRCs. Finally, some measures have been proposed to offer effective and more popular educational program through BOU.