Vice-Chancellor Prof Manoj Soni Babasaheb Ambedkar Open University (BAOU), the former MS University, has expressed the need to develop BAOU as the first online university or rather 'Cybersity'. Soni in 2005, during his tenure at MSU, pitched the idea of starting a Global Knowledge Consortium: School of Humane Excellence and Ethical Leadership (SHEEL), through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with University of South Florida (USF). But the fate of the project did not turn out as envisaged. Prof Soni had mooted this idea as a member of the BAOU board in 2004-06.
Earlier, during 2005, Soni had pitched for SHEEL, with an aim to enhance students' exchange programmes. But, according to MSU academicians, the project failed to pick up pace. The idea of the project was to mange the creation and sustenance of harmony between vast assets of traditional knowledge and relevant pursuits of modern science and conceptualising practicable, sustainable, India-specific strategies for harnessing knowledge creation efforts for realising well-defined goals of national security, national development, and individual advancement.
