What it feels like to study at India's biggest open university, IGNOU

The course curriculum is well designed by the renowned professors and faculty members from different universities in India and from abroad as well. The content was choosen keeping in mind to cover all the aspects of the specific subject for a pg student. As I mentioned before, the quality of study material was very good and helpful and very enough. But the pg thesis is missing from our course, due to which we were not able to do a research project. It appears to me after the completion of my first year that we can do our research under our given faculty but it wasn't mentioned in the course structure as it is mainly upto our faculties.

The total fee of my course includes admission fee, examination fee, tution fee, study material fee only, which costs me around 7000-8000 per year. It is a two year program, so my total cost was near about 16000.

Since it's an open university, we do assigned with a study centre (usually nearby colleges of other universities). I live in North East Delhi, so I had given Vivekanand Mahila College, University of Delhi as my study centre. We were allowed to use their libraries and classrooms. A separate IGNOU office was also their for our queries. And teachers were assigned by the same college. The classrooms were good and equipped with good desks and boards, canteen was also good and provide healthy eating options as well. All the college staff were very generous and kind to students and parents. Other than academics, there were no other opportunities provided by the university per say sports, extra curriculum activities and groups, etc.

I applied in college in Delhi only, and got selected in IP University as well, but I was looking for a correspondence mode of study so I withdrawl that option and applied for IGNOU. As many of my known were taken degrees from this university they suggested me to go for that. For admission, you have to fill up an admission form online, and it will lead you to the final payment mode, and after the completion of the form, you'll receive your Student ID and details of your regional centre and study centre as well. For MA English Literature, the eligibilty is to have a graduation degree in any course.

in my sourse, i.e. M.A. English Literature, there are 4 subjects each year and can be chossen by students from the given pair of modules, e.g. british literature, american literature, indian literature, etc. Each year a student has to take one full module by selecting only 3 subjects and the remaining one subject is an elective one which is same for all modules and students. The faculties were very good at their work and were available on call whenever we need them. If the class has been cancelled, then our faculty make sure to cover the left part by assigning a new class in between. The classes were in both on line and off line mode. I had total of 4 teachers in 2 years, namely: Amit Sir, Anand Sir, Mohit Sir and Monica mam. All of them are extrememly helpful and qualifies for their role. In Amit Sir, I found my role model and he never disappoints to mark his impressions on his students. Mostly the faculty members were from University of Delhi. The exam pattern was divided into 2 parts, internals (Assignments) and externals (Annual Examination). Although both internal and external parts hold 100 marks, but in the final resultant only 30% of internals and 70% of externals marks are counted, which is very unfair for students as their final percentage dropped by 4-5% in the final result. There is an app where you can download their study material for free, plus you can also buy the study material while submitting your examination fee. It is so far the best content I've read as a beginner in English Literature, and all the subjects are designed in a systematic manner, even I personally used them during my UGC NET preps which I cleared in one go in Assistant Professor category.

it's an open university so no such thing happened other than academics. Hence the students has no nightlife, but we did have our ID Cards, and are allowed to take participate in other university's fest only if we want to. And our classes were usually takes place on saturdays and sundays, so we do have priviledge to spend our week days in other activities or in jobs or any other stuff. Sometimes we did have classes on weekdays but only as a postponed or preponed form of class.