ABSTRACT

ODL students suffer from a lot of stress because of the many competing responsibilities they have to shoulder. With limited support from tutors, the university administration like in the conventional system and the rigors of balancing work, married life and studying, ODL students have to increasingly rely on coping mechanisms to deal with these stressful events. As a result they have to develop these coping strategies as buffers A qualitative study was done using various concepts from coping models and theories. During the past few years it has been observed that a large number of students in the formal system of education have taken very harsh steps even up to suicidal attempts. Moreover, many of the students who have successfully completed their studies and have joined good organizations are not able to cope up with the challenging and difficult situations in day to day life. The main reason of all such unwanted incidents seems to be in the faulty education system focusing only on the completion of a programme without bothering for the development of life skills to deal with the adverse situations and failure in life. The fact is that the main focus of all the education systems has been to get success in terms of passing the examination for getting certificate, degree or diploma within the rigid and fixed conditions. Whereas the heterogeneous group of students have different pace of learning, different learning abilities, different socio-economic background and individual way of handling the life situations.

The open and distance learning system because of its inbuilt learner friendly features and flexibilities has the potential to enable the learners to deal with the challenging and difficult situations and thus help them in reducing the stress as compare to their counterpart in the conventional system. Besides highlighting the basic principles and dimensions of stress management, the proposed paper will focus on the features of the ODL system which help in reducing the stress among the learners and also to prepare them to handle the adverse situations in life. It will also highlight the different areas of the ODL system that need to be redesigned so that the teaching-learning and life skill development takes place simultaneously. The related issues and challenges in doing so will also be discussed in this paper.

Key words: ODL, Stress, Distance Learning