The study focused on the effectiveness of newly initiated skill-oriented certificate courses namely beekeeping, mushroom cultivation and terrace gardening offered through distance learning approach in imparting knowledge and skills during the year 2019-20. The study was conducted with 180 randomly selected participants of three certificate courses each of 3 months duration and aimed to measure the effectiveness of the distance learning courses on the basis of 8 parameters such as course content, contact sessions, resource person expertise, duration of course, communication pattern, exposure visits, practical, new learnings gained and course objectives achieved. The findings of the study showed that the respondents of the beekeeping course perceived the course to be effective (58%) followed by highly effective (32%) while the majority of the respondents of mushroom cultivation course perceived the course to be highly effective (60%) followed by effective (40%) and 55 percent of the Terrace gardening course respondents perceived it to be effective. Age, gender, education, and farming experience had no significance with perceived effectiveness of distance learning courses while innovativeness and higher aspirations showed high positive significant relationship.

Keyword: Certificate courses; Contact sessions; Distance learning; Skill orientation.