ISLAMABAD,  : Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU) will start holding course workshops for Post-Graduate programs Spring semester 2020 Online from July 13 at the main campus as well as regional campuses of the university across the country.

This was decided in a meeting of the University’s Principal officers, Deans and Head of Academic Departments, held here under the chairmanship of Vice Chancellor Prof. Dr. Zia Ul-Qayyum.

Speaking on this occasion Prof. Dr. Zia-ul-Qayyum urged the faculty members to produce good quality content. He said that the university was making all efforts to provide affordable and uninterrupted online facilities to both teachers and students during the workshops. He said that the university was engaged in telecommunication companies to get discounted rates for the students.

Necessary training of the resource persons and tutors for the purpose will be held from June 28 that aimed at ensuring quality assurance in contents’ delivery.

Resource persons of these workshops will be mainly from academic staff of the University. However, each department could also outsource lectures of the workshops if the number of existing faculty members is found limited.

As per the decision, the workload of the faculty members will be: Lecturer-four courses, Asstt: Professor three courses, Associate Prof. two courses and Professor One course. Besides this, the essential workload of each faculty member will be allowed to teach 2-3 courses extra on payment.

The Director ICT informed the meeting that the University has upgraded its IT capacity both in terms of hardware and software at the main Campus as well as the Regional offices across the country.

Besides the main Campus, regions have also been equipped with webcam, sound system and multimedia. Moreover, load-balancing and connectivity of the internet have also been improved, he informed.

The number of servers has been raised up to four recently hence 120 classes will be held in each time slot simultaneously, he added.