Open School Learners’ Access to Paperless Initiatives at the Bangladesh Open University: Challenges and Barriers

Abstract

Open School has been one of the faculties of Bangladesh Open University (BOU) and runs the pre-University programmes for the dropouts. It executes paperless strategies to facilitate open schooling which has challenges and barriers because majority of tutors have been trained in traditional approaches of tutoring, and still students are gradually having experienced in use of educational technologies. The School found an opportunity to leverage its open educational resources (OERs) repositories titled ‘eBooks’ for lecture notes and ‘BOUTube’ for video lectures. The repository has been updated and increasingly content are being stored for the learners. The repository lets the School to create an online place that reaches students more effectively and materials can be uploaded entirety in a smartphone, laptop and computer. Still there are some challenges to implement the paperless open schooling. This paper discusses the paperless initiatives, and explores the perceptions and attitudes towards the components of the paperless components of the Open School. // Paper ID 173