ISLAMABAD, Nov 22: The Higher Education Commission (HEC) has initiated a process of bringing private students of universities into the mainstream of regular students so that quality education for the private students may be ensured.

In the third meeting of experts on ‘distance education’ which was held at HEC here on Thursday, it was decided that initially six universities of the country will have the Directorate of Distance Education set up at the cost of Rs6.3 million and for the first year funds will be provided by the HEC.

After a year of establishment, funds for them will be made available into the recurring grant of the universities.

The universities selected for the purpose of establishment of directorates are the University of Punjab, Lahore, Bahauddin Zakriya University, Multan, University of Peshawar, University of Karachi, University of Sindh, Jamshoro and the University of Balochistan, Quetta.

The universities are selected for the pilot project on the basis of number of private students registered with these universities.

It was observed that due to ineffective system of enrolling and examination of private students, they cannot compete with the regular students as a result their employment ratio is very low to the regular ones.

To improve this, it was recommended that from now on all private students will be called distance students.

There will be proper curricula, written material and interaction with the facilitator during the study period and their monitoring and evaluation will be carried out.

The PC-1 for the establishment of the directorates was agreed by the participants with few suggested changes and would be presented for approval in the next meeting of the HEC.

The key objective of this pilot project is to bring the degrees of private and distance students at par with regular students.