LAHORE - President Dr Arif Alvi on Wednesday said access to knowledge should be made easier for everyone and copyrights should not apply to universities’ academic material.

“Resistance to modernisation, latest educational techniques and new technology should be discouraged”, he said while addressing the concluding ceremony of three-day 33rd Annual Conference of Asian Association of Open Universities, hosted by Virtual University at a local hotel on Wednesday.

President believed that poverty, illiteracy and unemployment could be eliminated through goal oriented education and easy access to knowledge for all. “Our bureaucratic system as well as society offer resistance to modernization”, he observed, adding that this attitude must change now.

President Alvi said that internet was an affordable option to further expand knowledge horizons and stressed the students to extensively benefit from digital technology devices like tablets and laptops for getting access to diverse reference material. Dr Alvi said the concept of a classroom and text books had undergone a drastic change as modern gadgets were part and parcel of modern teaching methodology in the present age.

3-day universities conference concludes

He highlighted that open distance learning (ODL) was also a modern technique in which students were not bound to be at a specific place or time. Alvi said that distance learning was getting popular in the world and lauded the role of Virtual University and Allama Iqbal Open University for imparting knowledge through ODL. Later, the President gave away awards to prominent students of the open universities for their good performance and presented souvenirs to organizers.

Some 450 representatives of open universities from 12 countries attended the conference.